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T SHOWDOWN

MARCH 2012

a
a Ph.

Soaking up the sights in a
holiday location to die for

We've become so accustomed to having our hands held Бу today's breed
of eager-to-please games that being let off the leash can feel disorienting.
Aren't we supposed to be following this path to that building? Should we
really be poking about in this cave when we know that the real action is
over there? Isn't all this messing around going to... well, break something?
And yet freedom to do what we like within an interactive space is as
invigorating now as it was in 2001 when GTAIll broke the mould for
realtime gameworlds. (What, after all, would Skyrim be without its desire
to cut you from the apron strings and push you out of the door?) Which is
why the existence of a new Far Cry is something to be excited about.

Far Cry 3 most closely resembles the first game in the series, an FPS
often spoken of in terms of ‘if only’, its flaws keeping it out of the top ten
when votes are cast for Best PC Game Of All Time lists. In presenting such
an intoxicating open-world island setting and then forcing you to spend
part of your adventure skulking through murky labs and corridors, Far Cry
took away with one hand what it had given up so generously with the
other. But it’s an easy game to forgive. Pioneering works aren’t always
convincing across the board, and a bit of claustrophobia served with a
side order of not-entirely-convincing monsters are black marks against it,
but Far Cry's open-endedness was a milestone in game evolution. Its ability
to make you feel that you were making it all up as you went along, mixing
softly-softly and all-guns-blazing strategies on the fly, contrasted starkly with
the prescribed brand of stealth popular in other games of the time.

Forget about the indoor sections and bathe instead in that tropical
environment, with its shimmering bays, its foliage-strewn embankments, its
siltridden waterways and its ripe-for-the-plundering command posts, to
which Far Cry 3 has returned. This time, though, it feels like a considerably
more believable place, albeit no less dangerous. On p44 we talk to the
development team about how it's building a new type of threat.

Super Mario 64

‘ar Cry 3
60, PG, PS3

60, PC, PS3

zhost Recon:
uture Soldier
60, PS3

(COM: Enemy
Jnknown

60, PC, PS3

\ntichamber

linja Gaiden 3
60, PS3

treet Fighter

( Tekken

60, PC, PS3, Vito

(id Icarus:
Jprising
Ds

irt Showdown
60, PC, PS3

Follow these links
pughout the magazine
r more content online

litman: Absolution

102

106

110

114

116

118

120

122

123

james

Play

Final Fantasy XIII-2
360, P53

Wipeout 2048
Vita

Star Wars:
The Old Republic
PC

Uncharted:
Golden Abyss
Vito

The Darkness Il
360, РС PS3

Kingdoms OF _
Amalur: Reckoning
360, PC, P53

NeverDead
360, PS3

Metal Gear Solid
3D: Snake Eater
305

Haunt
360

Little Deviants
Vito

Everybody’s Golf

Vito

Reality Fighters
Vito

PJ VITA

Knowledge

10 3DS: one year on
Following the ups and downs of 12
months with Nintendo's handheld

14 TV gaming steps up

Gaikai's David Perry on how cloud-

powered TV play will kill consoles
16 The arcade touch

How iOS hits are storming arcades
with Adrenaline Amusements’ help

18 Edge Create Challenge 2012

We team up with Unity to launch
our first game-making competition

20 Record collectors

The dedicated gamers honoured by

Guinness World Records this year
22 Soundbytes

Videogame snippets from Michael
Gove, Gabe Newell and more

24 My Favourite Game

Richard Herring looks back on his
Electron-powered gaming youth
26 This month on Edge

Some of the things on our minds

during the production of E238

MARCH 2012

е
Dispatches
30 Dialogue
Opinions aired, points made —
and one 305 console given away
34 Trigger Happy
Steven Poole considers where
to draw the line with simulation
36 Level Head
Leigh Alexander looks at players’
relationships with gaming media
38 You're Playing It Wrong
Brian Howe leaks the outline for a
new deceptively arty game trailer

Features

76 Full House
How does the feature-stuffed kit
that is Sony's Vita measure up?

82 The Untouchables
Finding fault with the most revered
videogames of all time [part two]

92 Silicon Science

Talking tech with ARM as it lines up
next-generation mobile processing
Create

128 People

Opening a dialogue box with Charles
Cecil, the man behind Broken Sword

130 Places
Tramping into the halls of
Castlevania’s Gothic fortress

132 Things

Making a note of the progress

of save points through the ages
134 Studio Profile

Hard times for Arkedo prove that
desperate last shots can work out
138 The Making Of...

Ninja Theory's eastern-infused
Enslaved: Odyssey To The West
142 What Games Are

Tadhg Kelly looks at games as
part of the transmedia future
144 In The Click Of It

Clint Hocking explains why
games can hinge on their doors
147 The Possibility Space
Randy Smith wonders what will
satisfy today's mature players
can make us show our caring side

166 Edge Moves
Discover the game industry's best
new jobs in our recruitment section

EDITORIAL BUSINESS
Tony Mott editor in chief Richard Keith publisher
Mark Wynne senior art editor Jas Rai advertising sales manager
Alex Wiltshire online editor Richard Jewels advertising sales executive
Jason Killingsworth features editor Тот Acton brand marketing manager

Craig Owens games editor Robin Abbott creative director
David Valjalo writer Simon Maxwell group publishing director

Matthew Clapham production editor Jim Douglas editorial director

Andrew Hind art editor Mark Wood UK chief executive

EDITORIAL CONTRIBUTORS
Anthony Agnello, Leigh Alexander, Nathan Brown, Matthew Castle, Christian Donlan,
Duncan Harris, Andrew Hayward, Clint Hocking, Steve Hogarty, Brian Howe, Tadhg Kelly,
Brendan Keogh, James Leach, Simon Parkin, Matthew Pellet, Steven Poole, Jamie Russell,
Chris Schilling, Graham Smith, Randy Smith, Richard Stanton, Keith Stuart, Kevin Williams
ART CONTRIBUTORS
Terry Stokes, John Anderson, Martin Davies

THANKS TO
Ron Jenkins, Leah Smith

CIRCULATION Matt Cooper trade marketing executive | Rachael Cock trade marketing director
John Lawton international account manager
PRINT & PRODUCTION Mark Constance production manager
Frances Twentyman production co-ordinator
JCENSING Tim Hudson head of international licensing
Regina Erak senior licensing and syndication manager | SUBSCRIPTIONS Adam Jones
CENTRAL EDITORIAL Tim Clark editor in chief - games
Graham Dalzell group art editor - games | VVEB Rachel Titman digital project manager
Adam Millington digital designer | Leroy Kirby lead developer

| CONTACTS
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IMAGINATIO|

E3 CJ |р,
So much more ап just а motion capture studio...

www.imaginationstudios.com | info@imaginationstudios.com | + 46 (0) 18 10 69 30
Stockholm (Uppsala) - London - Belgrade - Los Angeles

Nintendo's 305 certainly got off to a rocky start, but the release
of a few key firstparty titles, and Monster Hunter 3G in Japan,
changed the handheld’s fortunes toward the end of 2011. As the
system approaches its first birthday, on р10 we take а look at the
reasons why it faltered, the challenges ahead, and the potential
lying in wait. While we're future gazing, we catch up with Gaikai's
David Perry as he foretells the death of consoles and the imminent
rise of TV-based cloud gaming, which seems a little less out there
now that the service will come integrated into certain LG sets (2).
Then on pló, we see how modern technology is revitalising the
arcade with a look at Adrenaline Amusements’ Touch FX cabinets,
which provide iOS games with big-screen breathing room. If
that has your creative juices flowing, head to p18 to discover the first
details about the Edge Create Challenge 2012 (4) №, on the other
hand, you're more of a watcher than a doer, consider the gamers
honoured by Guinness World Records ©) some of whose feats we
celebrate on p20. On p22's Soundbytes we gather together the
wisdom of Gabe Newell, the self-promotion of Tomonobu Itagaki,
and the reforms of education secretary Michael Gove ( 6 ). Finally,

оп p24, we come full circle as comedian Richard Herring @) T) tells

us what Nintendo handheld gaming brings to his fitness regime.

www. bit.lyIM3xla
Up-to-the-minute
game news and views

KNOWLEDGE
3DS

Nintendo is currently making a
loss on each 305 sold, but Iwata
said at a recent financial briefing
that he expects to begin making
a profit on units during 2012

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When 3DS's price was
cut just months after
release, Nintendo CEO
Satoru Iwata issued
an apology to early
adopters and took a
50 per cent pay cut

What do the first

Nintendo
one year later

12 months in the life of a console tell

us about the challenges of the modern gaming market?

" | 5 | № А
H ow auickly the glistening technology
rod r =
ot Ine future gives way то the

VM hen ADS Ju

made its first public appearance at E3 in

2010, it sounded like delightful science

ho-hum, untidy ргеѕеги

fiction, The prospect of glassestree 3D
— on the allure of futuristic
gadgetry th
relied on vi ideogt ames to provide. Mario
could jump out of the screen; Link could
nudge aside layers of foliage arrayed
with tangible depth lo reveal a long-lost
tempie. How did Nintendo pull it offe By
ihe lime ‚р eople were actually living wilh

the devi Ce, however. the question rom

certain quarters had changed to: why?
“lt was kind с

y fun | I week II)
says Alex Neuse

ol Gaijin C Games, mc ken ol 3055

SELCCT

ia! consumers have his! orically

Bit. Trip Saga collection, "but honestly,
il wasn't that different. It was just a
different flavour of Nintendo.”

Does that Nintendo flavour, or
‘difference’ — which made its DS the
bestselli ing portable console to date -
still have the same level of magnetism
lodaye One year on from its launch.
305 has come to embody the uncertain
future of the videogame OUSINGS

Signs of trouble emerged p rior lo

3DS's release. At the Game Developers

Conte anc ГА Т "d К 1
С агуы Ее IM i N March. [us 1 days СТ Hei

305 launched in Japan, Nintendo CEO
Satoru Iwata decried the quantihy al
cheap software on the App Store
"Quality does not malter to [Apple],

he said. He would go on to insist that

retail games and 3DS' 25 slil-unopened,

unnamed digital games service — soon
christened Ihe eShop — would set Ihe
system apart Rather than acknowledge
№! devices such as Apples iPhone had
C hanged the face of mobile gaming,
Nintendo's leader seemed fo be clinging
lo a myopic view ot how games are
now being made. released and played
Gluantity was more important than
lwata believed. Five months alter thal
speech, Nintendo had sold just over
#00000 3

har below the company 5 — 0 na, more

u TT "T =" ae mp кезү
Jo consoles, performing 50

crucially, hareholders' - expectations
that it a oped the handheld's price
heowi y in nal territories to ‘chante
momentum . It was a desperate move
Bloom berg ] Japan reported da 15 atter the

di Op thal Nint lendo was sell ng 305 ®

fh HOME

|
5

STORE FRONT
Even with an extra
three months to

iron out the kinks
following 305°%
release, the eShop has
had trouble finding
firm footing. Browsing

the

store is often

confusing thanks to
odd sectioning, and
learning about new
titles is a tricky
venture, Still, it's a
step up from the
WiiWare and DSiWare
stores, WayForward's
Matt Bozon approves.

"Having released titles

on all three Nintendo
digital stores, the
eShop is by far my

favourite," he explains.

“The recent addition
of 3D videos has really
helped buyers preview
the games."

at a loss, an unheard-of manoeuvre for
o company that had spent the past ten
years happily selling technology such
as Wii and DS аі premium prices. The
obvious need for quality software was
even more damning, since 3DS's
earning potential now rested solely with
games. Thirdparty publishers began to
delay and cancel titles for the system,
exemplified by Capcom; killing off of
Mega Mon Legends 3. The device thal
seemed so cutting edge just a year
before now seemed to be Nintendo's
biggest misstep since its Virtual Boy.
What happened? For starters,
305 simply wasn't ready for release. Its
digital games store, the eShop, didn't
open lor business until three months alter
the system was in players’ hands. Worse
still, developers working on the system
didn't have enough time to prepare
properly — those making launch games
for 3DS weren't even aware that
stereoscopic 3D was a feature. Julian
Gollop, X-Com creator and lead
designer of Ubisoft Sofia Studio's 305
launch game Ghost Recon: Shadow
Wars, recalls just how in the dark
designers were. “The biggest shock to us
was when Nintendo revealed that the
upper screen would have stereoscopic
3D, even though we hod
been using the devkits for
a while already,” he says.
"We had designed the
game with the touchscreen
as the main display In
order to enable stylus
control, and we were
using the upper screen for
the map and character
information. We had to swap the screen
functions around and abandon the idea
of controlling the game with the stylus."
Gollop's game was ignored when
305 first released, but has gained а cull
following since for its strengths. It's also
been singled out for its use of 3D effects.
"We got a lot of compliments from
players for our use of 3D. It made the
3DS feel like a window on а diorama
with little soldiers moving around. We
didn't try to exaggerate the effect just for
the sake of it. so it fel! comfortable for
most users, rather than gimmicky.”

3DS wasn't ready
for release; those
making launch
games weren t
even aware 3D
was a feature

The fact that the console's 3D effects
- despite the glassestree convenience —
feel like an unsalistying gimmick in mast
games is another hurdle that 3DS has
yet to fully clear. Super Mario 3D Land,
the flagship game that Nintendo so
badly needed at launch, clearly shows
that 3D can facilitate new play —
moving the 3D slider to reveal hidden
depth in a room full of blocks is clever
— but it's а rare exception.

Regardless, developers are now
warming to the technology, and that
greater understanding is helping the 3D
effect become a more useful tool in
designers’ arsenals. While Gaijin
Games wasn't initially impressed by
305, that indifference changed as it
retrofitted its games Юг the Bit. Trip Saga
collection. Gaijins Mike Roush says
it just took time: “Our expectations
were that we were going Юю go super
bonkers nutzoid with the 3D, bul after
working wilh the system we realised
that a subtler approach was almost
always better, more elegant. We often
had to wrangle in our 3D desires."

WayForward is also finding the
sweet spol for the 3D screen. "| have a
special place in my heart for 2D games.
They can be more whimsical than
polygonal games, but are
rarely as immersive,” says
Matt Bozon, director of
Mighty Switch Force.

"| think the stereoscopic
technology that the 305
brings does an amazing
job of drawing the player
into а hand-drawn world.
Ambient animation and
sound can go a long way, but this gives
us a new dimension to play with while
rendering worlds that can only be
described through illustration."

Mighty Switch Force and other
downloadable games released at the
end of 201 1,
quelled fears that 3DS would see the

such as Pullblox, have

same piles of shovelware that litter the
WiiWare and DSiWare stores. Those
games aren't what's selling the system,
though. Alter Christmas, Nintendo
announced that sales of 3DS had
leapt to more than 15 million units,

Thirdparty support is crucial for 3D5’s success.
High-profile titles such as Resident Evil Revelations
(top) and MG53D: Snake Eater are promising signs

jus! edging out DS's first-year sales of
14.43 million systems. The impressive
numbers followed the release of
marquee titles, namely Nintendo's own
Super Mario 3D land and Mario Kart 7,
which both sold more than a million
copies alter being released at the end
of 201 1. Monster Hunter Tri С helped
give the system а leg up in Japon when
it came out in December, too, but it's
undeniable that firstparty titles were, os
usual, what convinced people that they
needed this new Nintendo hardware.

So Nintendo has proven once again
that it makes solid games about ltalians
jumping and driving cars. The burden
remains, however, to prove that the
system 15 fertile ground for game makers
intent on reaching a wide audience. As
such, the real test for 305 is yet to come.
The next few months will see big-budget
titles from major thirdparty franchises hit
the system, including Kingdom Hearts:
Dream Drop Distance and Metal Gear
Solid: Snake Eater 3D [reviewed р1 22].
The success of those games and olhers
like them, from a business perspective il
not a creative one, will determine if third
parties have a future on 305.

There's more pressure riding on
these games, though: 305 is a proving
ground for the sustainability of all

Special bundles bolstered a strong holiday period,
pushing 3055 Japanese sales over 4 million. The
arrival of Monster Hunter 3G (right) helped, too

devoted portable gaming machines. As

Svstem furns Ore. „л s ге using
Ё Nl

its PlayStation Vita. Unlike 305, Vita is
coming out with a stable of games
backed by strong brands, including
Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Wipeout
2048. 3055 apparent turnaround has
that SCEE president Jim Ryan said in o

recent interview thal the company is

emboldened Sony as well, to the extent

encouraged by Mintendo. Sony's device

is also buill fo succeed oul the aate

k ; | Ё Г Д | А Fi
where Nintendo's tailed, particularly in
having a strong digital marketplace
HRS
ready trom the get-go.
VVhat Vita doesn't have is а Mario
E 1 = |
Kart. Uncharted is a worldwide smash,
: | Р | = Р ry
with the three main PlayStation 3 games
sel ing in excess of 13 million copies,

but its hard м in the league of Nintendo's

core tranchises: Mario Kart Wii has sold
over 28 million copies since 2008

3DS con survive as a orofitable console
supported by Nintendo's games alone
Developers suc -h as We Forward and
Ubisoft's Sofio Studio have shown tha!
lhere's creative soil lo be filled in
developing tor 3D5, too, but there's still
little proof that they can make a living off
of il. In year two, 3DS no longer has lo
prove it can sustain N ntendo. it has to

otter game makers more Ihan jusl ia ;

| a [ ij: [ uL de
screen that used to feel like the М E |

Mario.Kart 7 (top), 'Ocarina о! Time 3D (left) and Super
Mario 3041 and (above) have all sold over a million units

While it’s still unclear
whether or not 305 will
recapture the creative
spirit and commercial
success һа! kept DS a
happy home for game
designers for nearly a
decade, there are some
games on the horizon that
have exciting potential
What will define 305 in
2012? “Two words:
Animal Crossing,” says
Julian Gollop. "The vastly
improved connectivily
features of 3DS are just so
well designed to support
this game. | think we
should get some more
interesting developments
all round with games

that blur the distinction
between online and offline
play to create an almost
seamless connection
between these traditionally
separated modes."

KNOWLEDGE
CLOUD GAMING

Pall, assured and evangelical,

David Perry, founder of cloud
gaming service Gaikai, isn’t short of
an attention-grabbing quotation or two.
"| cannot envision a world in which all
games are not consumed via cloud
storage,” he says in his keynote speech
at the Cloud Gaming Europe conference
during a cold January in London.

“Cloud gaming is setting the endgame
for consoles as we know them."

Hubris? The ravings of a man who's
bet the latter part of his career on the
cloud? Speaking just one week alter
television manufacturer LG announced
at CES a deal to include Gaikai in its
forthcoming sets, there's a ring of
prophetic truth to his words.

"Consoles are going to go away,” he
tells us alter his presentation. "They'll turn
into media boxes, which is exactly what
Sony and Microsoft have been doing in
their marketing for the devices. Soon they
won't even be called consoles... When
a game console does everything it
becomes irrelevant, because its full
functionality can be offered by television
оп а Wi-Fi network. Why would | want
a $500 box when | can access all of its
content direct through my TV?"

Perry is obsessed with ‘friction’ — the
number of obstacles that prevent a player
from playing a game. Friction is what
keeps console and PC gaming a niche
hobby, he argues. "Apple has reduced
friction on phones – before, you had to
lype your credit card details to buy every
mobile game. But Sony has gone the
other way in making things more

complicated. These days you сап poy sa J
Bes! Buy $129 lo come iO your house `

aming steps uj

With Gaikai functionality to come packed into LG TVs,
consoletree gaming for the masses is making strides

help you set up your PS3 with updates.
likewise, it takes 43 clicks to play a
demo of Los! Planet tor a firsHime user on
Steam. IF you look at the figures on this,
Ihe publisher has probably lost 95 per
cent of its customers by this point. Gaikai
takes two clicks to play Dragon Age."

The LG deal potentially combines the
power of console and PC gaming with
the neartrictionless experience of cloud
gaming, all within a TV. CES attendees
were wowed with

H —
demonstrations of Super Con soles are

Street Fighter IV: AE

playing on an LG set with

m
no additional hardware They | furn into

modifications to their circuitry but say they
plan that for the 2013 TVs - the amount
of latency they COU d SE would morae
than cover the transil time on the Internet.
It's going to get to the point where the
consumer won't be able to tell if it's going
through the Internet or TV. 2013 is my
prediction for when we won't be able
to distinguish between a streamed and
a console version of a game."

It's an exciting claim, but could it
be that Perry is covering Gaikai's back,
pushing blame lor any
latency on to the TV

gol ng to go away. architecture? It also raises

Ihe question of whether sets
released with Gaikai in

attached, the full game media boxes and 2012 аге, to а certain

streaming from Gaikai's

"RU ie |
servers. Street Fighter IV won t even be

degree, unfit for purpose
due to this latency. Either

was an interesting choice called consoles” мису, it's clear that LG isn't

tor the demo, since its
staunchest fans obsess over frame data.

“Televisions are not designed to be
fast,” Perry admits. “The signal comes
in and it's moving from board to board
internally before it hits the screen with
around 70 to 90 milliseconds of delay,
At Gaikai, we're constantly battling
atency. From my house to a Gaikai
server is eight milliseconds. My hotel in
London is five milliseconds from a Gaikai
server, so we are dealing with these very
small numbers in general, 15 been my
objective to build the fastest network ever.
So when you suddenly get 90ms in ће
TV architecture, that's а big problem.

"But imagine a TV manufacturer totally
gets into bed with us and gives us a
direct link fram our ethernet port straight

ыз erm fb SUE Re „еше, Е

he only TV manufacturer
working on these problems. "Every
major brand will soon sell televisions with
cloud-gaming services in-built," Perry
claims. “| haven't spoken to a single
major TV brand thot isn't in some
process of deciding to do this.”

Perry believes Apple is planning
the announcement of a digital TV,
while Microsoft will move into the
the TV business, With Sony already
manufacturing TVs, does this mean the
console wars of old will switch to TV
wars? IF we want to play a firstoarty
Sony title, will we have to own a Sony
TV? "That paradigm of games being
locked to single devices is going to
go away, in my opinion," Perry says.
"If 50 devices can stream your game,
you won't want to sign exclusivity.” MI

Gaikai claims that 73
per cent of players it
has polled would rather
play through the cloud
than via downloads

If every TV owner has
access to the full catalogue
of recent game releases
without the need for game
dises or additional
hardware, the pool of
players dramatically rises.
That's simple mathematics.
For evidence of the
difference in scale
between traditional
gaming avenves and

new ones, Perry points to
Facebook, where player
numbers of, say, FarmVille
[above], swamp those of
traditional console and PC
games. "IF the latest World
Of Warcraft expansion
had been released on
Facebook," he says, "it
would have debuted at
67th place in the charts
based on player figures."

David Perry is founder of cloud gaming service
Gaikai. The company is looking to Wi-Fi TV sets

as the future for gaming, while competitor OnLive
announced during CES that it's partnering with
Google TV to provide its gaming services

KNOWLEDGE
TOUCHFX

ike the classic coin-op games that

drained our collective pockets, many
of the best app games today trade in
simple skills, repetitive mechanics and
brief play sessions that can be [and often
are] repeated ad nauseam. Perhaps it's
fitting, then, that mobile sensations such
as Fruit Ninja and Flight Control have
made the transition from tiny handhelds to
arcade units bearing bulging, 46inch
multitouch displays, via Adrenaline
Amusements’ TouchFX platform.

The Canada-based manufacturer
hoped to make a "big iPad" Юг an
arcade environment, says Marc-Antoine
Pinard, vice president of business
development and marketing; something
so extravagant it could
never be found in an
average home and
sturdy enough to handle
thousands of daily finger
swipes. Essentially, il's
an upright version ol
Microsoft's multitouch
Surface tablet, albeit
outfitted with existing
brands that pull in players
already attached to the mobile originals.

Nearly 1,000 such screens now
populate bars and other social spots in
the United States, making TouchFX one
of the rare recent coin-op success stories.
Adrenaline launched Fruit Ninja FX — a
translation of Hallbrick's produce-slashing
smash — in early 2011, picking the доте
first due to its ever-increasing mainstream
awareness опа approachable nature.
"We were looking for something where
people could touch the screen and right
away know what they have to do,"
explains Pinard. "My two-yearald is
playing Fruit Ninja on my iPad. He
doesn’t need an explanation."

“TouchFX is
something where
all of your body
is embedded in
a multimedia

experience"

Hallbrick spent weeks working with
Adrenaline to refine the experience for
the larger display, as porting the portable
app meant reworking assets and
rebalancing the game due to the longer
finger swipes needed to decimate digital
apples and bananas. “The fruit are
actually now pretty clase to actual size,”
notes Phil Larsen, the studio’s chief
marketing officer. “It gives you an even
better sense of satislaction by slicing
with such broad strokes.”

Pinard believes the best arcade
experiences deliver " 360-degree
immersion," and between the large
display, booming speakers and active
movement needed to interact with the
touchscreen, he says
TouchFX is “something
where all of your body is
embedded in а multimedia
experience’. By building
these larger and arguably
more enthralling versions
of popular mobile games,
Adrenaline hoped to
recapture the sensation
of being sucked into on
arcade racing game some years back
via glossy screens and forcefeedback
chairs, despite owning and playing Ihal
same title on а home console. It's a
gamble to expect fans to spend as much
on a single arcade play as they might on
the full mobile app, however — but it's one
that oppears to be paying off thus far.

The two TouchFX offerings that
followed Fruit Ninja similarly expanded
upon established franchises, but aimed
for notably distinct demographics. Flight
Control FX brings Firemint's tinger-based
aeroplone-directing affair to public
spaces, and Pinard says it's been

The arcade touch

How Adrenaline Amusements turned mobile apps into
coin-op favourites one massive touchscreen at a time

Marc-Antoine Pinard
(top) is Adrenaline
Entertainments’ vice
president of business
development and
marketing; Phil Larsen
is the company’s chief
marketing officer

successtul In capturing the imaginations
of oftalienated bystanders: "For the first
time, we ore seeing moms playing an
arcade game instead of sitting at a table
and watching a kid play.”

Infinity Blade FX. оп the other hand,
makes a strong play for the hardcore set,
thanks to its medieval hack-and-slash
duels and multiplayer batles available
on multiscreen TouchFX units, Still, Chair
Entertainment's celebrated adventure was
a surprise pick for an arcade release,
considering the length of the original
quest and the strong sense of personal
progression held within. The arcade
iteration distills that approach down to
a rapid succession of battles - like a
traditional coin-op fighter — in which a
fallen round means pumping in cash to
continue the trek to topple the familiar
God-King from the iOS titles. Adrenaline's
research says Infinity Blade FX is primarily
attracting Android phone owners, who've
thus far been denied their own mobile
version ol the showcase swordfighter.

Expanding TouchFX's global presence
is now a key goal for the company, with
34 countries outside the US set lo receive
units manufactured locally in each region.
Additional titles are planned - Pinard
hopes to pursue an adaptation of Infinity
Blade Il down the line = but multitouch
displays won't be the company’s only
focus: Adrenaline plans to bring two new
hardware experiences to arcades, which
he ambiguously hints are “aligned with
technologies seen at Ihe [2012
Consumer Electronics Show].

And what about creating original titles
as opposed to porting mobile favourites?
Don't count on il any time soon. "There
are way too many brands," claims
Pinard. "| would rather work with ууһа!
people like right now.” №

TOUCHING BASE
Adrenaline’s first three
louchrA cabinets span
a diverse array of
popular mobile titles,
with more in the works
O Infinity Blade FX,
the gorgeous hack-and
slash dueller, serves up
the series’ swordfights
while minimising the
between-battle activity
present in the 105 hit
© Flight Control FX
still requires players to
land aircratt by tracing
their paths to a runway,
hut benefits from the
greater breathing
space of the arcade

on TouchFX well before
its similarly enlarged
Kinect counterpart
shipped last year

Infinity Blade was never
a slouch in iOS form, but
for its arcade debut, Chair
Entertainment implemented
a few touch-ups for the
gargantuan displays.
"We're able to really
crank up the textures,
shadows and post-
processing effects to

make it look even more
amazing," says Donald
Mustard, creative director
at the Epic Games
subsidiary. Infinity Blade
FX offers another new
element: physical
redemption tickets that can
be exchanged for trinkets
and prizes at amusement
centres. “It's so awesome
to be wailing on the
enemy and notice а bunch
of tickets streaming out of
the arcade machine as
you do it,” Mustard adds.
Already available in North
America, the game will be
in arcade and amusement

All three of Adrenaline's TouchFX cabinets house the same 46-inch multitouch display and hardware, but
parks worldwide soon.

each is uniquely skinned in order to stand out in a crowded public venue and attract players money

KNOWLEDGE

Introducing the Edge
te Challenge 2012

Win a Unity Pro account and an expenses-paid trip
to the Unite conterence in our browser game contest

Wi teamed up with the company
| j| = р . 1 d =
Г behind game engine Unity to

launch a game creation competition,

From March 6, we'll be inviting entries
based on a to-berevealed theme ana
built wif Unity |

=j . |
пе winner and МО runners-up wi De

nM Web | DIOAN':

gwarded Unity Pro licences and both the
Pro add-on 5, еас h
orth HW 5001 In total The

11 | А
winner will es neta Irophy and a rip

A z | F = rm Я ce
Android Fro and JS

sel being nag VM

to Unite, Unity 5 developer conference.in

Amsterdam iñ Augus! inc uding airfare;

hotel room and an entrance pass for one

person, Entries may also be featured in

the pages ol Edge ond on our Web site,

05 well as in other F uiure DU iblii cations

and via Unity's Web site and netwo Se
The Кае version of Un ity gives you

all You need to build your eniry. ts а

2D and 3D

be able to

powerful, extensive toolset foi
games, and you' else | make
use of Unity's Assel Store, a resource ol
нее ond paid-tor assets that include art
shaders sounds n tutorials. Ромма а

Unity аллоу 3d. eT

www.bit.ly/AgDQdv
Full competition details,
plus terms and conditions

3 e Edge Create Challenge 2012
wi үк off аш ng Ihe San Francisco
С on March 6, when we'll ке Ihe
heme and the judging panel, which will
ec sd ne various Br [е fig ures in game
development [including Unity's to S
and Edge staff. 7

Км

he panel will be loo king

а creative interpretation of the theme.

originality ana technical merit, The

С omg date is six weeks later April Fo
Visit МАА edge >online.com / unity

competion for more news ‚further details

and ful erms and с опао! ONS

` NEW CONTENT FIRST
J ON XBOX LIVE

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pma

EON

Í RECORD COLLECTORS

Celebrating game enthusiasts who've taken things to extremes

ami Ps E Fn,
ountries tom 15528 to ZU |
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hen heres mos! expensive virlua

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A HIDEO KOJIMA GAME

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FEATURING THREE METAL GEAR SOLID GAMES
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METAL GEAR SOLID
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© Konami Digital Entertainment Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE, and the Xbox logos are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies. “<M” "PlayStation", and “PS3" are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment inc. "c f. 3" is a trademark of the same company. All Rights Reserved. Trademarks are property of their respective owners.

KNOWLEDGE
TALK/ARCADF

ARCADE
WAICH

Keeping an eye on the
coin-op gaming scene

oundbytes

Game commentary in snack-sized mouthfuls

"Some people think they can get away with something
and just hope that people won't see through the bullshit

The Internet 1$
way smarter than
any of us.”
ysell - Іпа
. //
variety of senses.

When asked who he paid mos! attention to in 201 1, Valhalla's
Tomonobu Itagaki doesn’! shy away from a pal on his own back
F F

Game Storm Racer
Manufacturer WAHLAP Technology

In the heyday of the arcade
scene (remember the neon haze
and the unrivalled opportunities
for second-hand smoking?),
Japan-based manufacturers and
developers ruled the roost with
AAA arcade games and cabinets.
As this column has attested in
recent months = with iOS ports
(E236) and East Asian titles such
as Power Truck (E237) - the
landscape is changing and the
power is shifting. Other territories
are beginning to produce games
that imitate and aim to improve
upon traditional genres.

Consider Storm Racer, the
second part of China-based
distributor WAHLAP's one-two
punch, which began with last
month's Power Truck. The game is
another straight-up shot of arcade
racing adrenaline, which has been
adapted by indie developer Insoft
from a PC title and invigorated
with a crisp 720p display running
60-Trames-per-second visuals.

Gameplay requires Ridge
Racer-style drifting to build up
boost, while stages are gorgeous,
with sweeping vistas that evoke
Sega's Daytona USA. The sense
of speed and camera placement,
meanwhile, conjures fond
memories of the seminal OutRun
2, demonstrating that these new
arcade contenders aren't just
cloning classics, they're striving
to recapture old magic.

The ability to network up to
eight cabinets — to Power Truck's
four and matching
that of marketplace
competitor Dirty
Drivin’ (E235)

- suggests that
WAHLAP is

both improving
its technical
capabilities and
addressing a gap
in the market

" 92 l = — жа = i | = = og. eo 40 HE = = J EI سے‎ m у= | = - —4 m
Shenmues licence is an IP that belonas

ы A
LJ Jeu

The death ol Shenmue's social outing on mobiles doesn't
necessarily spell the end for the series, affirms Yu Suzuki

"Technology in schools will no longer be micromanaged

by Whitehall. We're giving schools and teachers
freedom over what
ana how to teach

I. - os wg М |
revolutionising ICT as we know it. for mass-

multiplayer

UK education secretary Michael Gove opens the door lor a new wove of game makers experiences.

22 EDGE

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SONY

make. beleve

KNOWLEDGE
FAVOURITES

! nce one half of lee & Herring,
Ihe comedy partnership behind
TV shows such as Fist Of Fun (recently
released on DVD], Richard Herring
has spent the past decade writing and
performing solo stand-up shows while
also appearing on the TV panel-show
circuit and launching hit podcasts such
as As It Occurs To Me. In between, he
maintains a gaming habit that began in
the wilds of Cheddar in the early '80s.

What's the first videogame system

you remember using?

Му sister bought something that
connected to the TV, which played tennis
and maybe two other games, but the first
thing | could play on properly was an
Acorn Electron computer. My parents
bought it thinking | would learn to
program computers, but most of the

lime | just played Kevin Toms’ Football
Manager, which is one of my favourite
games ever. | also liked things like
Defender. | remember playing various
adventure games, bul they were very
difficult because you would have to get
the wording exactly right or the game
wouldn't go on to the next section.

This was the early ‘80s: did you feel
like there was a kind of revolution
happening, or did it feel like just
another distraction?

It was really exciting. | remember when

| played Space Invaders with my friend
Phil Fry at the Cliff Hotel in Cheddar
Gorge, sneaking away after school with
а pile of ten pence pieces without my
mum and dad knowing, and thinking that

was incredible. | liked pinball as much as

you look out into the
audience and there'll
be lots of cool young
hipsters,” Herring
observes, “but you
come to my gigs and
you look out and
there's lots of bearded
men ¬ computer geeks

videogames, really. | really loved any
gadgets and games, and the idea of
being able to play these things at home
seemed revolutionary back then.

GamesMaster Golden Joystick?

| do - it's pretty much the only thing

I've ever won in my life. [Laughs.] The
challenge was to make a film using very
primitive editing software. It's on YouTube
now, if you really want to watch it.

Going on games you've talked about
in the past, you seem drawn to quick-
fix things, such as Mario
Kart and Rock Band.

| got Guitar Hero and The
Beatles: Rock Band and
I've only played them
about three times. It's such
an outlay, and then you've
got to have it all set up
and it's got to all work,
and if anything goes
wrong... Also, with something like that,
its only really fun if other people can
play it with you. That's why l've tended
ta go for games like Civilization Il in the
past. It really ate up a lot of my time,
playing it on my own.

What was it that really grabbed you?

lt was one of those things where you'd
go, “Oh, I'll just play until the end of the
next turn,” and then eight hours later
you'd still be playing, because there was
always something going on — it was
cerebral enough to keep you thinking
about stuff. Then you'd just want to make
sure your caravan got somewhere, or the

“Mario Kart is
actually good in
the gym because
you start to cycle
harder when

you’ re losing"

My favourite game
Richard Herring

Talking quickfix play and long-term addiction with that rarest of
breeds: a comedian who's won a GamesMaster Golden Joystick

wor progressed in a certain way. | just
liked all the different ways that the game
could go — you'd play it and it'd be
different every time.

Which games have been distracting

you in recent months?

I've been playing a lot of Monopoly

on my iPhone, but on holiday | started
playing Mario Kart again on my DS,
which | haven't played for ages. l'm
trying to get the point where | go to the
gym and sit on an exercise bike, and
that's where | play these games. Mario
Kart is actually good [for that] because
you start to cycle harder
when you're lasing. You
think you're controlling it.
[Laughs.] You can sit on
an exercise bike and play
Monopoly or Mario Kart
or 45 minutes and forget
you're exercising. l'm trying
to find games that will
keep me going in that
way, Yahtzee is a perennial favourite =
I've played thousands of games of
Yahtzee. There is a woy of getting better
at that game — it's quite mindless, but
there's a logic to it,

What's your favourite game of all time?

It's a tricky one — a toss-up, really,
between Football Manager by Kevin
Toms and Civilization by Sid Meier. I've
tried various incarnations of Civilization
and | think | just really understood the
second one. Purely in terms of the number
of hours I've played it, Scrabble might
beat it, but | think Civilization Il is my
fovourite game of all time. BI

www.bit.ly/zVmetx
More gaming talk
wit^ Richard Herring

Herring's stand-up show
What Is Love Anyway? is
touring across the UK until
May. Visit his Web site at
www. richardherring.cam
for tour dates, links to his
podcast work, and his diary,
containing nearly ten years’
worth of daily entries

KNOWLEDGE
THIS MONTH

WEB SITE

Love letter From Canada
www.bit.ly/xOkkZn

Keita "Katamari Damacy"
Takahashi left Namco last year
to move away from the game
industry, But just when he
thought he was out, И appears
it — or at least developer Tiny
Speck = pulled him back in.
Currently based at the
company's Canada studio,
where he's hard at work on
under-wraps MMOG Glitch,
Takahashi is writing a blog
that's a light-hearted,
insightful charting of both a
developer's work experience
and а foreigner's view of a
strange new land. It's an
invaluable look through the
lens of an eastern game
auteur a5 he navigates the
western industry and its
quirks. Takahashi's also a keen
photographer, snapping his
way through life = including
tours of other studios - and
then mixing in a colourful
avatar that would make the
King Of All Cosmos proud.

нин mp om Epp ie ce ee:
a ES ш шшш DO PU шышы в шыл Re

BOOK

Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson

VIDEO

Battlestar Galactica RPG
www. bit.ly/yootk
Live-action adaptations of
popular game franchises have
made a bad habit of botching
(or, worse, abandoning) the
core pillars of their source
material. CallegeHumour's
16bit-style RPG adaptation of
the recent Battlestar Galactica
remake 15 a great inversion ol
that trend. It's a parody that
employs all af the main plot
milestones of Ronald D
Moore's uneven TV show, and
its creators are keenly aware
of RPG traditions, using
everything from item selection
ta turn-based battles to tell
the tale of the ill-fated
Galactica's voyage home

WEB GAME
Midas

www. brt.ly/whBLs4
Wanderlands entry for
the Ludum Dare Jam 72-hour
competition is a masterclass in
tight, simple platform-puzzling
and minimalist aesthetics. You
play Midas, whose infamous
touch turns platform blocks to
gold, causing them to stack or
drop into oblivion, depending
on how the level lies, You have
two objectives: touch water to
allow Midas to make human
contact, and then reach your
beau. It's trickier than it
sounds and the short levels
are punctuated with narrative
nuggets, giving players а
thread to hang on to as they
leap around each stage.
Remove the wrong blocks on
your journey to water and you
may well destroy your chances.
of reaching your lady soon
after, The look, feel and
rhythm is closest, perhaps, to
Sony's Echochrome — high
praise for a game made under
serious time constraints

TWEETS

| really wish these piracy bills didn't have

Known primarily for genre-defining cyberpunk novel Neuromancer,
William Gibson has a reputation as one of the most forward-
thinking authors of his generation (he did, after all, foresee the
Internet). While the quality of his fiction is no secret, it may come as
a surprise to find Gibson has slowly but surely amassed a solid
portfolio of journalistic work, which is collected for the first time
here. From glimpses of a brush with Hollywood (highlighting one of
the few joys of Johnny Mnemonic, Takeshi Kitano) to an encounter
with Akira creator Katsuhiro Otomo, Distrust That Particular Flavor
takes in a wide spectrum of milestones in the writer's life.

fe A PU PRÉ чала, AE об

Vita's second stick
How can such a nubby
little thing deliver so
much satisfaction?

Snakeskin 305
A Nintendo handheld
that looks like it has bite

Zelda's timeline
Finally, our chance to

link the series together

Disturbing mods

Hold on, My Little

Skyrim Pony was just a

bad dream, right? Phew

Vita and PS3

Living happily together,
but transferring data
takes time and patience

Sony's The Tester
Back for a third series.
Really. A third series

Zelda's timeline
Mmm. Less definitive

than you might expect

Fake ban emails
We really wanted The
Old Republic's "special
dance zones’ to be real

names so similar to tasty mexican dishes. Keep
reminding myself: SOPA bad, SOPE delicious
@chuck russom

Chuck Russom, sound designer/recordist

Received this mail today: Your game was so
beautiful that it made me cry—literally--and kept

me off heroin for a month, you are heroes!
&DavidAnfossi

David Anfossi, executive producer at Eidos Montreal

LOTS of requests to keep the unusual "rotating
eyebraws" bug in. Could it be that | have
stumbled onto the Holy Grail of game design?
@danthat

Dan Marshall, indie develaper

Idea: Shenmue Clicker

Eibogost
lan Bogost, professor at Georgia Tech

TH ON EDGE

A "-— of hings | that tugged at our attention during the production of E238

namco
INTRODUCES

rwo SWORDS. x |
TWO GENERATIONS...
ONE DESTINY.

SOULCALIBUR IS OUT NOW FEATURING
EZIO AUDITORE ,
www.soulcalibur.com °

1—3. DOE ты

Www. рей! info

SOULCALIBUR™Y ©2012 NAMCO BANDA Games Inc, © 2012 Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights Reserved. Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft, and the Ubisoft logo are trademarks
of Ubisoft Entertainment in the US. and/or other countries. KINECT, Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox LIVE, and the Xbox logos are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies

and are used under license from Microsoft. “07 "PlayStation; "P535 ^0]. ZI and "IM^ are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sony Computer Entertainment inc
All rights reserved.

ч,

| Ест @ XBOX 360 EK ONE CLS. Mecum

| LI
=

© 2012 EA international (Studio and Ри тг Lid. Mass Effect, the Mass Effect logo, BioWare and the BioWare loge are trademarks of EA International (Studio and Publishing) Lid. EA and the EA logo are trademarks of Electronic Arts inc. KINECT Xbox.
are trademarks of tfe Mecrosoff group of companies and are used under license trom Масової. “ДЫ”, "PlayStation, "PS3^, 22 Г = and "4° are frademarks.or register trademarks al Sony Compier Entertainment Inc. AN other Trademarks are ia p

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А Er; Жы M. т "e

DISPATCHES
MARCH

Within Dispatches this issue, Dialogue
sees Edge readers tired of overexposure
to gaming mascots, unwilling to put up
with Skyward Sword's lineage ot flaws,
and irked at sales of adult games to
minors, but overjoyed at tinally getting
hands-on with Vita. In Perspective,
Steven Poole $ questions the ethics of
simulating torture in a videogame setting,
Leigh Alexander Ñ asks why gamers are
so passionate about their media, ana
Brian Howe % has managed to lay his
hands on a script outline for the latest
deceptively highbrow action game trailer.

www.bit.ly!yG qQof

Dialogue
Send your views to
edge@futurenet.com,
using ‘Dialogue’

as the subject. Our
letter of the month wins a 305

Know your roots
Brian Howe's column on the rise and fall of
Sonic-alike Swifty The Marmoset raises an
issue I feel is particularly relevant to another
overworked franchise: Resident Evil. The
plight of Swifty, to be overused and over-
exposed by the game industry’s brand-
obsessed goons, also applies to Revelations’
two leads: Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine.
It was Chris and Jill’s seeming innocence,
their lack of battle scars, that for me
contrasted so boldly and brilliantly with the
skin-eating monsters in the original Resident
Evil. Ever since the tension and turmoil of
the first game, I can’t help but feel the series
lost its way (ves, even with the much-revered
Resident Evil 2 — the first hint that Capcom
had more of an inclination towards action
and explosions than survival horror),
Perhaps it’s as much to do with the
changes to gameplay the series has seen
since Resident Evil 4, wonderful as that game
is. In its fixed-camera debut, guns and ammo
were like gold dust: taking aim was a shaky,

scary trial that could see your progress
halted in a few seconds. It may have been
about zombies, but Resident Evil, in its
puzzles, item-management and pace, was
grounded in а sort of realism. And that’s why
my heart sinks at the footage of Resident Evil
б. Not only do I not get a sense of believable
threat from the announcement trailer, I don’t
get a sense of realism either. It looks as far
from the silent, shock-filled corridors of the
series’ origin as can be, and ever since the
developer has moved into action-adventure
games, the results have underwhelmed.
Brian James

While Resident Evil 6 looks a far cry from
the series’ roots, there’s an argument to be
made that it perfected that formula with
its 1996 debut. When you make such a
defining game, just where do vou go next?

Caught up in its own legend?
Having spent the past two months plaving
Skyward Sword at the rate a 55-year-old with
chronic anaemia might be expected to, I can’t
understand how the entirely justified praise
for the finer parts of this game has not been
tempered with discussion of its weaknesses.
| know Nintendo doesn't fix what ain't broke,
but what ain't broke can still age, like a VCR
in a PVR world. The problem isn't SD
resolution (gameplay matters more and 480p
upscales surprisingly well anyway), but that
the rest of the game engine is locked in 1998.

There's no level streaming, just fade-and-
walt to move between areas, or enter/leave a
building. The system still loses track of areas
between visits, what does/doesn't regenerate
or get reused is what's easiest to code or
saves most space, not what makes sense.
So while I can live without voice acting,
bizarrely you can only speed up text, not skip
it, but can skip repeat cutscenes, even when
reloaded from a save made before you first
saw them. Pickup 'stings' for some items are
shown the first time in a session, even mid-
combat, regardless of how often you've seen
them before. For others, it's every time, and
it's not configurable. And so on down to the
minutiae, such as interface elements that
can't handle arbitrary quantities.

It would take а 'fanboi' with a hand-sewn
Mivamoto plushie to argue that any of this
is critical to the feel, or that the workarounds
it creates are part of the experience. The best

DISPATCHES
DIALOGUE

that can be said is that time not spent on
updating such elements may have been used
to create the superior gameplay. The worst is
to air a suspicion that the game structure is
so antiquated and modular that no one dares
update it, because they don't know how.
There is always a point in the product
cycle where a'not broken, don't fix it'
approach becomes strategically broken. It was
clearly a mistake not to at least HDMI-enable
the Wii when the competition caught up on
motion control. Skyward Sword repeats the
error in software, ignoring advances in open-
world and persistent object engines,
inventory management, and interface design.
Gameplay may be king, but other pieces
must be developed to survive in a chess
game, and at Nintendo some of those are
starting to look glued to their squares.
Dave Lockwood

Points well made. Part of Nintendo's charm
is that its titles feel wholly its own, though,
and Skyward Sword could have it worse than
sharing issues with a 1998 game that's still
just about perfect. To refresh yourself on
that legacy, try the 30$ that's on its way.

Fighting the good fight

I have to disagree with your assessment, in
the Skullgirls preview in E237, of beat ‘em ups
as "frustrating. It's encouraging to see, at a
time when cvnics are ever-prophesving the
death of traditional genres, that one of
gaming's oldest still has a presence in Edge,
and indeed the industry at large. Street
Fighter IV, of course, is largely to thank, but
so are a raft of developers, both indie (as
with Skullgirls developer Reverge Labs) and
established. To see Soul Calibur V getting a
great score on home consoles, alongside the
release of a solid iOS port of the original,
shows me that the beat 'em up is one genre
that hasn't got ahead of itself chasing
ridiculous or unnecessary innovation. The
formula is tweaked from time to time, but
the core components remain familiar
enough to be inviting time and again.

A good case in point is your Post Script
on Soul Calibur V. Basically, when beat 'em
ups do try to outreach their grasp, such as
emulating other genres’ storytelling, they
fall flat on their face. My point, I suppose,
is that while other genres chase a golden
goose, adding laver upon laver of polish ©

DISPATCHES

DIALOGUE

Does good gameplay
absolve Skyward Sword
of its hand-me-down
flaws? Not according
to Dave Lockwood

and mechanics for users to juggle, the
simplest approach is often the best. Beat ‘em
ups have barely changed since the early-’gos,
when we learned the wafer-thin narrative of
Street Fighter and decided it was enough to
keep waggling fightsticks for the next 20
vears, and more power to them.

Phil McDowdy

We'll drink to that. It's odd (and refreshing),
in a time of ever-growing storytelling
ambition among developers, to be able to
honour a genre for its narrative shallowness.

Age gate or revolving door?
Гуе just watched the ‘Hero’ television advert
for Gamestation. A middle-aged woman
walks up to the brave, helpful staff behind
the counter and asks for Saints Row for her
nephew. There follows a close-up shot of the
counter with a copy of Saints Row: The Third
being passed to her. In clear view on the case
is a big red circle with ‘18’ written in the
middle. Now, I'm well aware of
modern-day families and
relations being of all ages, but
surely vou can understand my
point. The ad is clearly aimed
at parents/aunties/uncles/
whoever who aren't confident
enough to go into a shop and
purchase the correct game for
the lucky recipient. There's
nothing wrong with that —
helpful and informative staff
are a very good thing. However, upon
watching the ad you must agree that the age
of the woman is such that her nephew stands

a fairly good chance of being younger than 18.

It seems wholly irresponsible of a
nationwide chain to advertise in this way. I’m
not just targeting Gamestation, either. Upon
release day, I visited mv local Sainsbury's to
pick up my preorder copy of Modern Warfare
3, only to be asked by the lady behind the
counter: “Is this another violent one?"

“Yes, very,” I replied.

“My son plays these Call Of Duty ones.
He's only eight. That's bad, isn't it?!"

“Yes it is, they have very bad language,
bloody violence and torture.”

“Oh, but he says there aren't any good
games that aren't 18s."

+ here are а lot of very good games

Bed

ше "ае for all ages.”

Near is working
much better
than StreetPass
on 3DS in a
crowded city
like Hong Kong

| eventually gave up due to her lack of
interest and while walking out passed
another lady with her son, who was no more
than 12, picking up a copy of MW3 and
telling his mum that it's the one he wants.

Now, I have ten years' experience of
working in supermarkets at various levels at
various companies. We regularly had mystery
shopper visits from Trading Standards who
used 18-year-olds that looked a lot vounger
to try to buy alcohol. We used to dread these
visits, since they can lead to fines and job
losses. As staff, you also had to politely
refuse sale of any age-restricted goods if you
believed they were being purchased by an
adult with intent to give to a minor.

There needs to be tighter control on
stores selling games — by Trading Standards
and their own management. Perhaps this will
aid our beloved industry in being recognised
as a more adult-orientated one, rather than
*just for kids; as it is still seen by many.
Andy Masterson

This is an issue that took the
spotlight last year. While a
large portion of responsibility
can be laid at the feet of
retailers for controlling sales,
at least as much responsibility
surely rests with parents to
get educated and know the
content of the media they buy.

Living with Vita
| have just got my PS Vita and it is fantastic.
Near is working much better than StreetPass
on 3DS in a crowded city like Hong Kong. I
bump into lots more Vita players and receive
many in-game gifts, even for games I have
not yet bought. This is a brilliant way to
entice me to buy more games. It also helps
that on the PlayStation Store the download
versions of retail games are slightly cheaper
than buying the game card. I hope you guys
can start giving out a Vita for your letter
of the month soon.
James Woo

How developers choose to exploit Vita's
connectivity in the coming months will be
fascinating — the inevitable arrival of a

new Monster Hunter will no doubt deliver
some of the goods. In the meantime, for our
full appraisal of Sony's console, see p76. B

ONLINE
OFFLINE

Your responses to topics
on our Web site at
www.edge-online.com

Nimblebit says Zynga
cloned Tiny Tower in
its new mobile game,
Dream Heights.
Zynga CEO Mark
Pincus says Mimblebit
can't complain since
the genre has been
around for years.
Does he have a point?
[www bit. ly Гуса СВ

It's fascinating that I'm not
allowed to make a copy of
a game, but if | were to
MAKE a copy of a game,
that’s legally acceptable.
If that’s the way our legal
systems work, | really
need to become a lawyer
and quit working for

a living (no offence,
scrupulous lawyers), or
sell my sweded movies

to rival studios.
NewBond, Edge forum

Scary reading. In a culture
where iteration is prized
over innovation il is sadly
understandable however.

Regmcfly, Edge forum

It's not about the artwork
or the graphics. Zynga
has copied their gameplay
mechanics down to the
smallest part. That's

not taking inspiration

from another game; it's
blatant rip-off!

Truls На, via Facebook

Aren't they both

inspired by Sim Tower?
When The Legend Of
Zynga: The Farmville
Hourglass appears there
might be more to be
concerned about.
Stewart Nolan,

via Facebook

You fool, Nolan. Everyone
knows they have work
experience hacks trawling
Facebook for ideas!
Giuseppe Giovanni Morris,
via Facebook

SUME TAKEOVERS
ARE MORE HOSTILE
‚ [RAN OTHERS.

SIT

22 “J Or Origi:

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

marshdavies.com

STEVEN POOLE

Trigger Happy

Is it OK to simulate torture
as long as it tops up our
revulsion of it? If so, where
do we draw the line?

ou pick a shard of glass out of the broken
window and stab the guy in the mouth
with it. He doesn't tell you what you
want to know, so vou start punching him in
the head. He spits blood, and then spills the
beans. Now vou can go happily on your way,
probing the unlocked new plavspace with
vour permanently tumescent rifle.

What's obscene about this moment in
Call Of Duty: Black Ops isn't so much the
lovinglv simulated blood and violence, but the
implication of its embedded national security
ideology: that torture is an effective way to
elicit mission-critical information. In most
videogames, a quick scene of torture porn is
just functionally equivalent to pulling a lever.
And this might even lead to you an argument
that such scenes in games aren't too graphic,

but on the contrary, they aren't graphic — or
prolonged — enough.

[an Bogost's superb recent collection of
essays, How To Do Things With Videogames,
makes just this argument. In Disinterest, he
argues that ragdoll Web game Torture Game 2
is offensive precisely because of its "lack of
earnestness and depth of simulation", and
praises the Wii version of Manhunt 2 because
its gestural controls generate a “physiological
response" as well as the psychological disgust
the player feels for what they're doing. His
conclusion is a bracing one. “A murder
simulator ought to revile us, the more the
better," Bagost insists. "We should simulate
torture not to take the place of real acts but
to renew our disgust for them.”

The normative value of Bogost's 'should'
is interestinglv shocking (he appears to be
recommending the production of more torture
simulators), but I am suspicious of his reasons.
Does our disgust for acts of torture really need
constant renewal? Would it otherwise be
dulled? Don't the grubby thrills of, sav, the
torture porn movie genre (Saw, Hostel, and
so on) actually depend on our
disgust being inexhaustible, even
as it can coexist with guilty
pleasure when we know it isn't
really happening? I recently
watched The Human Centipede
2, a grimly, brilliantlv perverse
sequel that plays with the idea
of someone tempted to act out
fantasies suggested by a media
product. The sequences with the
teeth and the knees are so
revolting that I’m completely sure I wouldn't
need to play an interactive version just to top
up my disapproval.

Another implication of Bogost's argument
is that if the deep simulation of torture is
justified by our moral edification, then we
would be all the more morally edified by
playing simulations of other acts we find
repellent — just to be sure we keep finding
them revolting, to "renew our disgust" Bogost
is arguably constrained by his own reasoning
to also approve of a rape simulator, such as the
2006 Japanese game RapeLay, which has the
player grope women on a subway train and
rape a mother and her two teenage daughters.
In fact, Bogost writes about such eroge and its
forebears in another essay, Titillation, but he
does not call for the production of more such

Everyone knows
torture is bad,
too — it's just that
some people

think you should
do it anyway

games. Perhaps his assumption is that
everyone knows rape is bad, so no one needs to
play a rape simulator to be reminded of it.

Yet everyone already knows that torture is
bad, too — it's just that some people think you
should do it anyway. This has also been an
obscenity in our culture since the days of
Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's grubby lexicon
of euphemisms: the ‘abuse’ or ‘stress, or
‘expert’ application of ‘tough interrogation’
to prisoners. Appeals to a 24-style ‘ticking
bomb’ scenario became the rhetorical
comfort blanket of a particular kind of macho
commentator. But to force those people to play
torture simulators in the hope of changing
their minds would be to misunderstand what
passes for their argument in the first place.
Even the academics and columnists who
insist on the necessity of torture don’t claim
that it’s a pleasant business. Indeed, their pose
as hard-headed realists — able to face up to
perilous facts and tough decisions — depends
in part on a continued acknowledgment that
torture is horrific in itself.

We should feel equally uneasy, though,
about any automatic moral
equation between simulation
and reality. Such a confusion is
at the heart of Britain's laws on
'extreme' pornography, which
bans not only photographic
images of people performing
acts of, say, BDSM or bestiality,
but even computer-generated
images of such acts, the
production of which has
involved no people or animals at
all. Our simulations are so much less powerful
than the kind of 'ancestor simulation' an
advanced civilisation might run (in which the
philosopher Nick Bostrom says we could all
actually be living) that the characters in them
do not count as living and cannot suffer. But
the people playing them, whether or not we
turn out to be simulated ourselves, can
suffer, in that we might feel degraded by the
experience. If developers ought to make more
torture simulators for the reasons Bogost
offers, then it seems to follow that they
should also make simulators of all the other
horrors we can imagine humans inflicting on
one another; but I’m not sure that anyone
needs to, or should, play them.

Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life
Of Videogames. Visit him online at www.stevenpoole. net

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make. believe

SONY

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

LEIGH ALEXANDER

Level Head

In the Internet age, what
is the gaming media's
value, and why are fans
so passionate about it?

hese days, most readers seem to rely on
the games press as a source of news,
information, and the all-important
review. Without us, how will anyone know
what's going on in the gaming world and which
of its products are good? Obvious, right?
Well, not so much. When it comes to news,
the kinds of information often reported by
the games press don’t, on the face of it, have
much use for gamers — what do sales trends,
predictable release announcements (a game
with a‘2’in its title will be followed by one
with a‘3’? Stop the press!) and screenshots of
games everyone will get to play in a couple of
months really tell anyone about the industry?
Reviews are almost worse. Maybe 15 to 20
years ago games were primitive enough that
you could compartmentalise and evaluate

them with a degree of supposed objectivity,
but modern videogames are such complex,
and ultimately subjective, value-dependent
experiences that even the idea of a review is
imperfect. Judging by reactions to popular
game reviews, audiences seem slow to adapt to
the idea of educated opinion vs definitive
qualitative statement, too.

This is especially true given the democratic
Internet climate. One wonders what value
users feel they derive from those who purport
to be authorities when they can share views;
aggregate opinions and sentiment; and gather
almost all their own information on forums,
social media networks, and community blogs.

However, although I might have a skewed
view from my position, it still seems to me
that game consumers are more passionate
about their press than other fields. I know
plenty of film fans and literature buffs, vet
none of them could recount the daily doings
of their favourite movie writers and book
reviewers. However, gamers are aware of — if
not passionate about — the individual voice,
preferences and career trajectories of the
writers they like on their
preferred sites. Game journalists
also often have more Twitter
followers than more objectively
relevant public figures.

When the game journalism
landscape shifts — someone gets
a new job, say, or one Web site
closes and another one opens —
you'd think fans would consider
it mundane minutiae. But some
recent changes in the US games
media (the promotion of Stephen Totilo to
Kotaku editor-in-chief, the founding of Vox
Games) brought about a flurry of discussion —
enough to highlight just how much gamers
value their press, albeit in an abstract yet
fervent fashion that's tough to quantify.

To some degree, this is because game
journalists are aspirational figures to many
young gamers. The most passionate niche of
the traditional gaming community values
competition and mastery. To many, being a
game journalist is probably analogous to being
at the top of a leaderboard, in that both
positions are assumed to prove some degree
of supreme knowledge and skill.

There’s also the popular conception that
game journalists ‘get paid to Es V у, -

day’ occupying some mythik

The value of the
gaming press
isn't its authority,
but in providing
gathering places
for culture

that involves a glorious daily soak in this
hobby, punctuated by free videogames and
paid trips to consumer conference meccas. Of
course, it isn’t really like that. Even if it were,
it'd be like having to eat nothing but chocolate
cake with milkshake all three meals a day for
three years, or something — you know, the
kind of thing you'd only fantasise about until
you actually had to do it.

But even this fantasy is secondary when it
comes to why gamers follow their games press
in such a charged, love-hate fashion. What's
clear is that the primary role game journalists
play is to act as lightning rods for fans. The
only thing gamers love more than games is
talking about them, including making guesses,
analysing, arguing and one-upmanship, and
sorting facts into order. Thus the foremost
value of the gaming press isn't its authority or
ability to deliver facts, but its role as governor,
and in providing gathering places for culture.

Never is this more clear than at year-end.
As a gamer, I find the annual litany of top
fives, top tens, best this and so on inspiring
and alleviating. Even though I'm part of the
process and write a few myself,
these roundups give me a sense
of closure and participation.
Our industry evolves so fast,
and we're so inundated with
content, with experience and
with information. When I can
read several sites’ lists and seek
consensus — or, failing that,
seek a better understanding of
what sorts of people like which
sorts of games — it helps me
know where my own feelings fall.

The games audience is a unique bunch of
consumers. Га wager they care more about
their press than, say, film buffs seem to
because they are more entrenched and more
vocal about their hobby than other kinds of
hobbyists. Maybe it’s because gamers still
carry the mantle of outsider status; maybe it's
because interactivity and fantasy escapism
enhances the sense of us belonging to a world
that not just everyone can enter. Most likely,
it’s because criticism, dialogue and character
are absolutely essential to the culture of new
media. Helping us moderate and process all
of that emotion is probably the consumer
games press's most important job.

DESTIN YF
RAGES WITHIN

>“

BRIDGE SE

DISPATCHES
PERSPECTIVE

BRIAN HOWE

You’re playing
it wrong

The condensed script
outline for a new
deceptively arty game
trailer has leaked

hopin's ‘Farewell’ Waltz plays over a
( white screen, indicating CLASSINESS.

JACK (V.O.): "This is where it all began.”
The music grows louder, as if drawing nearer.
We also hear COSY LAUGHTER and
CLINKING GLASSES as the white screen
starts shimmering. JACK (М.О, CONT'D):
“Right here, on a perfectly typical April night.”

CUT TO INT. - SHIP’S LOUNGE -

NIGHT: The screen clears like fog to reveal a
FANCY COCKTAIL PARTY in full swing. The
brass portholes behind the buffet tables tell
us that we're on an ocean liner. ELEGANT
LADIES in high-collared gowns mingle with
CHARMING FELLOWS in dinner jackets
beneath the civilised glow of shaded sconces.

Storemags com

The camera weaves through the POSHY
EXTRAS and then lingers on a SLINKY VIXEN
in a red dress, her lowered eyes hidden by a
cloche hat. JACK (У.О, CONT'D): “You
probably think this story's about her.” The
VIXEN lifts her head, revealing stunning
SAPPHIRE EYES. We track her smouldering
gaze across the room until it alights on JACK,
our protagonist. He's 30 vears old, ruggedlv
handsome, and wearing a white tux with à
carnation in the buttonhole. We see him swirl
a MARTINI, his face shrewd, as if considering
something. Now assuming JACK's perspective,
we pan back to the VIXEN, zooming in on her
face as she offers a coy but inviting smile.
JACK (М.О, CONT'D): "But you're wrong.”

The close-up widens out to reveal the
words RMS TITANIC stencilled on the wall
behind the VIXEN, as the Chopin music slows
down and falls out of tune. We see a fast,
arrhythmic montage: a looming ICEBERG; an
exploding BOILER; a broken string of ROSARY
BEADS, BODIES and SHIP PARTS tumbling
into CHURNING WATERS; a darting
MERMAID; CORRIDORS blocked by twisted

“But I thought of her often in the days that
followed.” SUPERIMPOSE OVER BLACK:
"TRAILER BY MISDIRECTION STUDIOS?
And then CUT TO the SHAFT OF LIGHT, still
tracking downward. The light grows dimmer,
and bubbles rise from the bottom of the frame.
JACK (М.О. CONT'D): “She seemed like my last
link to another world — gentler, more
promising, more sane.”

SUPERIMPOSE OVER BLACK: "WITH
ASSISTANCE FROM AWARD-BAIT
ANIMATION: We CUT TO the BUBBLES
again, and the body of JACK enters the bottom
of the frame (we recognise him by the
carnation on his white tuxedo). He limply
comes to rest on the ocean floor. The music
stops with a soft SCREECH, and we watch
the drowned-looking form of JACK in
MEDITATIVE SILENCE. Suddenly, his eyes
POP OPEN, and we glimpse movement in the
nearby CORAL REEFS: a flash of GREEN-
SCALED FIN; a streak of RED HAIR. We hear
a melodious but ominous GIGGLE, as JACK,
panicking, reaches out to grasp a STRANGE
OBJECT protruding from the CORAL. JACK

WRECKAGE; a sepia CAMEO (М.О. CONT'D): “A link I would
LOCKET melting in FLAMES; a "Th ar sever forever on the edge of a
STRANGE OBJECT protruding пе camera socc-powered blade.”

from Cak and other assorted weaves through SUPERIMPOSE OVER
CHAOS and NONSENSE. Over pum BLACK: 'SLUTTY MERMAID
the JANKY CHOPIN, we hear the POSHY CHAINSAW GENOCIDE’ And
See БИТИБ SELTEN
CREEPY GIGGLES. The sounds lingers ona Cobra plays, indicating

abruptly stop as we CUT TO a с Iv H" VIOLENT IDIOCY. We see JACK
WIDE SHOT of an elderly SLINKY VIXEN pull an ANACHRONISTIC

pianist with a sad, calm face,

who plinks out a melancholy Moonlight
Sonata as the flood water, already up to his
knees, slowly rises. The screen goes dark.

SUPERIMPOSE OVER BLACK: ‘BLOOD
PUNCH GAMES PRESENTS: The Moonlight
Sonata continues playing, indicating SPOOKY
GRANDEUR, and we CUT TO EXT. - OCEAN
- DAY. We see a SUNRISE over a sea strewn
with WRECKAGE. JACK (М.О. CONT'D):

“Т never saw her again.”

SUPERIMPOSE OVER BLACK: ‘A
HIGHBROW FAKE-OUT PRODUCTION: And
then CUT TO INT. - UNDER THE OCEAN -
DAY. We see a single SHAFT OF LIGHT
piercing the blue-green water. The camera
pans down the SHAFT, taking in brightly
coloured schools of FISH and other
ASSORTED WHIMSY. JACK (М.О, CONT’D):

CHAINSAW from the coral, his
NECK VEINS BULGING HORRIBLY as he
REVS it up. HARD CUT TO a frantic montage
of JACK’s VICIOUS and UNPROVOKED
DISEMBOWELMENT of this race of
SCANTILY CLAD TEENAGE MERMAIDS. We
see him executing KILLER COMBOS, with
UNDERWATER BLOOD SPRAY EFFECTS
galore, and MERMAID LIMBS and SEASHELL
BRAS flying everywhere. The montage builds
to an unbearable pitch of intensity, and then
screeches to a halt on JACK’s blood-spattered
face, as he growls his catchphrase: “Time to
make some merm-alade.” SUPERIMPOSE
OVER BLACK: ‘SLUTTY MERMAID
CHAINSAW GENOCIDE, COMING
CHRISTMAS 2012.

Brian Howe writes about books, games and more for a
variety of publications, including Pitchfork and Kill Screen

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#238

THE GAMES IN OUR SIGHTS THIS MONTH

www. bit.ly/it20iG

Up-to-the-minute
previews and reviews

In with the old
There are two primary audience camps, and therefore design
considerations, that factor into the resurrection of old intellectual
property. There are those already familiar with — and fond of - the IP,
and there are those for whom this will be first contact. The conundrum is
how to please both? Can a game developer possibly serve two masters?

This month’s Hype is brimming with long-absent brands making a
comeback. Our look at Kid Icarus: Uprising (p72) sees Nintendo taking
a stab at bringing back ап 8bit action-platformer. Some 305 owners
will feel pangs of nostalgia, but for many Uprising will be a blank slate.
Yet if any company can keep the faithful happy while recruiting a new,
younger audience, it's surely Nintendo, and its approach here could be
a masterclass in meshing old iconography with new mechanics.

Next up: three franchises that emerged over a decade ago - Hitman
(p50), Ghost Recon (p56) and XCOM (p60). All built followings with
specitic gameplay principles, and their returns demonstrate attempts to
iterate while remaining accessible to newcomers. The danger is that
these projects could become halfway houses, unable to appease the

die-hards but also failing to compete with titles that
have emerged during the time they’ve been away. If

MOST
WANTED

House Of The Dead 4 PSH

More of this, please: an HD revamp ol
on arcade lightgun game given the hull
PS Move compatibility treatment. As a
primer, House Of The Dead Ill is sitting
on the PSN store, also with Move
controls. That Sharpshooter peripheral
might be getting dusted off after all

Sound Shapes Vita

Hokanle by its absence at Vita's launch.
Sound Shapes remains one of the
system's most attractive propositions
Taking the indie spirit [and developer)
ot Everyday Shooter, it sees music ond
platforming collide on a gorgeous
canwvas ol colour ang creativity

Pokémon « Nobunaga's
Ambition 05

An intriguing crossover between
Pokémon and Тесто Koei's long-running
turn-based strategy series Nobunaga's
Ambition, this hybr d looks to be a visual
del ght as you collect ‘em all to unite Ihe
17 kingdoms of its historical setting

Ghost Recon tries but fails to match the spectacle of
Modern Warfare, or XCOM: Enemy Unknown neglects
the forward progress of the strategy genre, they may
cancel out both sides of the audience equation.

Finally, there's this month's cover star, Far Cry 3
(244). Three iterations have given us three disparate
plots, but rather than suggest incoherence, the Far Cry
brand has become synonymous with a 'setup' rather
than inconsistency. The founding principle of a Far Cry
game — survival against the odds in an open world -
has remained intact, offering a lynchpin around which
different studios have been able to work, showing that
games can, paradoxically, be both old and new.

s | i
aL

(far Gy 2 aHered a
ion Of hardened
mercenaries to play as,
NUUS. ову $ hero a
normal guy. An aptitude
for murder aside, Jason В
Brody's ordinariness is
the point; this is the story
of one man's descent into
vidlence when he's cut
| off from the society he
pws and has to resort +
tremes to survive ч

i е

FAR CRY 3
Ubisoft returns to the tropics for an ореп-
world shooter you may be crazy about

Publisher Ubisoft
Developer n-house (Montreal)
Format | 360, PC PS3
Origin | Canada
Release | 2012

Combat is gimmick-free,
offering a familiar toolset,
but it's the freedom to use it
however you see fit that sets
Far Cry 3 apart. That said,
the game's upgrade system
will see Brody improve his
various abilities over time

ause Far Cry 3 and, alongside the usual
slate of menu options, you'll see а
blobby, butterfly-winged shadow of a
Rorschach ink blot fill the screen, with peeks
of lush foliage visible between splotches of
darkness. It's the perfect symbol tor a game
fixated with the loss of sanity, and set on
making plavers question their own.

Thinking can be kev in its fighting too,
with Ubisoft Montreal's game offering the
open-ended combat the series is known for,
letting players plan encounters from miles
off. The approach is up to you: charge in for
a frontal assault, hang back to snipe enemies
from a distance, or slap a C4 charge on the
side of a jeep and send it barrelling straight
into an enemy encampment. But all this
freedom is tied to a narrative that drops the
hard-edged political cynicism of Far Cry 2
for a focus on the personal, charting one
man's spiral into violence, and quite possibly
madness, on an archipelago where everyone
else seems to have a head start.

One mission in particular, a hallucinatory
push through an island’s underground caves,
illustrates the point well. Protagonist Jason
Brody is injured, and looking for a doctor.
After picking his way up a slope that offers a
postcard-perfect view of the glistening bay
below, he finds an equally pretty sight at its
summit — a freshly painted bright white

-i

wooden house that serves as a reminder
that South Pacific islands make pretty good
retirement spots when they aren’t serving
as murderous hellholes.

The man who painted it — still spattered
with splotches of emulsion — is found inside
the greenhouse. He's unlike any doctor we've
ever seen, quickly administering an injection
of who knows what, but mostly rambling to
himself in a jittery, dreamy fashion. His name
is Dr Earnhardt, and his is simply one of the
many flavours of madness that Far Cry 3 will
present to players. In return for helping
Brody, Earnhardt insists on the player getting
him some mushrooms from a nearby cave
system, and this fetch-quest setup is the only
conventional part of the mission that follows.

First, there's no shooting. At some
point the weathered AK Brody clutches at the
outset of the task is lowered, and we don't see
it again until much later in the session. In
place of gunplay, there is platforming and
exploration — Brody makes running jumps
over precarious drops once he's in the caves,
which can only be accessed through ап
underwater tunnel at the bottom of a cliff.
Some scripted crumbling handholds add a
dash of peril, but it's only when Brody moves

"fat iter into the caves’ depths that things

conje truly rmipzedictat

FAR CRY 3

BELOW As well as native
fauna, players will have
domesticated animals to
contend with. Exactly what
form the hunting system
will take is unclear, but it
all seems to fit the game's |
theme of Brody discovering | Бы;
his inner savagery to survive

That's when your earlier injection begins
to kick in. Colours begin to saturate before
changing hue entirely. Perspective becomes
unreliable, and objects that appear within
reach one moment suddenly shrink from
view. Brody takes a second to look at his
hands, which have started leaving ephemeral
trails as they move through the air. To make
matters worse, the cave seems to be reshaping
itself around him: walls turn to floors when he
tries to climb them, and plants appear from
nowhere, sprouting from the ground alongside
puffs of smoke that look like more Rorschach
blots. When he finally finds the mushrooms
and escapes, night has fallen.

For the most part, Far Cry 3 isn't going to
be quite this psychedelic, but the scene clearly
demonstrates the preoccupation with mental
states that runs throughout the game. Dr
Earnhardt is crazy, the island's villains all
display equally unstable tendencies, and Brody
himself is clearly losing his grip. He was an
ordinary man on holiday with his friends and
girlfriend, but is now caught up in a situation
that threatens to send him off the rails.

“We knew] we wanted Far Cry з to be
emotional and raw,” explains producer Dan
Hay, “and the word ‘insanity’ kind of just
percolated out of those early meetings. We
began to see that we wanted to have a raw
emotional experience, and we wanted it to be
very much the story of one person sort of
caught in a moment. When we really felt like
we captured it was when we got Vaas. That's
when the word ‘insanity’ crystallised for us.”

The star of the E3 2011 demo (in which he
ruminated on the definition of insanity before
dropping a tied-up Brody into a waterhole),
Vaas is only one of Far Cry 3’s many villains,
but he’s quickly become its poster child.

“A sociopath, and very nearly a psychopath,”
in the team’s words, he’s also creepily
charismatic. His presence stalks the island —
Dr Earnhardt mutters about him, and
eavesdropping on conversations between
guards suggests a respect that’s built on fear.
Thankfully, the performance artist behind
the murderer is easier to talk to.

“Vaas is a very intense, very explosive
character, and he's a lot of furi to play,” says

The assault on the Medusa
is a showcase for the Far
Cry series approach to
combat. Unlike a corridor
shooter, you can sneak,
snipe, rampage through or
even bypass these battles,
and planning's encouraged

actor Michael Mando. *He's one of those
people who doesn't differentiate between
what he feels, what he says and what he does."
Mando originally auditioned for the part
of a more conventional villain. *He was a six-
foot-six, 300lbs, very stoic, very serious,
unemotional person,” Mando explains. “Me
being nothing like that, I auditioned for the
part, and gave them the complete opposite of

The true meat of the Far Cry 3
experience will be found in

planning the perfect assault

what they were looking for. And obviously
I didn’t get it. But my agent called me up
about three weeks later telling me that
Ubisoft liked the audition so much that they
were willing to create a character based on
the audition that I had done.”

Behind the manic intensity of Mando's
performance, there are hints that Vaas will be
more than just a two-dimensional threat. Of

Vaas's violent intensity
(above left) is in stark
contrast to Dr Earnhardt
(above), whose distracted
and rather nervous persona
gives the unshakeable
impression of an addict
who's suffering from
withdrawal symptoms

www.hit.y/AD6RIJ
Screenshot gallery

Ubisoft's own diagnosis, he says: “Personally,
[ don’t think of Vaas as a sociopath or a
villain. If you get under the surface of Vaas,
there’s this incredible amount of pain.
Everything’s just an extension of that.”

Players, however, probably won't be
feeling so sympathetic towards the character.
It's unclear whether or not Vaas is personally
holding Brody’s loved ones captive, but he's
obviously an obstacle to their safe return.
The next part of our demo sees Brody sent to
disrupt Vaas's communications by shutting
down the radio tower of a beached cargo ship
named the Medusa. It's a set-piece designed
to show off the fact that, despite Far Cry 3's
madness theme, the game is still, in Hav's
words, “a shooter first”

Starting out in the ocean, Brody creeps
onto the beach before quietly pulling a knife
from a guard's back pocket and stabbing him
with it. He does the same for another guard,
before throwing that knife into a third's skull,
a signature move that appeared in the E3
demo, Within range of the boat now, he

= E
Straight shooters
It's something of a relief to see Ubisoft's demonstrator get
through multiple levels without his qun falling to splinters in
his hands, meaning the weapon degradation of Far Cry 2 is out.
“It's something we thought about early on, but for that we listen
to the fans," explains game designer Andrea Zanni. "It didn't
necessarily go over well, so when we approached Far Cry 3 we
looked at it and thought, "What can we do with this?’ And in the
end we decided that it just doesn't fit the experience we want."
Weapons still look anything but factory fresh, but it's the sound
effects that make them truly stand out: they're thundering.

pulls out a pair of binoculars — a Far Cry
staple — and assesses the situation.

Ubisoft Montreal is promising a‘360
degree' approach to gameplay design, with
every scenario tailored to offer stealthy,
action-focused and creative approaches. In
truth, this is little more than an extension of
the open-endedness that was already part of
the Far Cry experience, but this beachfront
set-piece demonstrates the point well. The
sand is strewn with cover for those who want
an open-air gunfight, while stealthier players
can hide within the exposed hold of another
beached vessel as they move towards their
goal. One tester, we're told, simply hopped
on a distant hang-glider and coasted to the
radio tower, bypassing the battle entirely.
After our demonstrator opts for an aggressive
approach, reinforcements begin landing in
hovercraft on the beach. It's a section rich
with possibility, and the true meat of the
experience will be found — as with Far Cry 2
— in planning the perfect assault.

The Far Cry series has been built on and
around these moments, so what we see next ©

FAR CRY 3

is a surprise. It’s a sliver of a later mission,

in which Brody has infiltrated a (this time
seaborne) ship in search of a friend, The
environment is more linear, of course, with
fewer options to plan, but it’s a brilliant
opportunity for Ubisoft to show off an ear-
splitting shotgun at close quarters. And when
Brody slides open the hold doors, he triggers
an explosive booby trap, flooding the ship. His
struggle to escape is the kind of scripted set-
piece that makes up the entirety of games
such as Call Of Duty, and is more than a little
reminiscent of a chapter in Uncharted 3.

This blending of open-ended design and
adrenaline-fuelled scripting should make for a
less predictable game than Far Cry 2, which —
for all its ambition — suffered from the kind
of clockwork mission layouts that could easily
lead to fatigue. But, of course, it's not the only
departure from the second game. Ubisoft has
returned to sun-drenched archipelagos from
whence the series came, and it's clear that the
team is thrilled to be back.

"It wasn't like we set out to make it on an
island," Hav explains, "but we wanted it to be
a lawless frontier, we wanted it to be beautiful,
all that stuff. The more we talked about it, and
the kinds of experiences we wanted to have,
the more we wanted the feeling of isolation."

The South Pacific setting certainly offers
an attractive blend of beauty and savagery,
with the western fantasy of a tropical paradise
melting away to reveal a violent struggle to
survive. As open-world designer Jamie Keen
explains, “We want to make sure that it feels
consistently like an area in the Indian Ocean:
Pacific Islands, Polynesian islands, that kind
of thing. But we’re not trying to limit it too
much. The main thing is that this is an island
of insanity where anything goes, that the
roughness comes through in the art”

And it’s not just a static environment,
either. When Brody ended his drugged trip
through the caves earlier we spotted a rather
large lizard foraging in the nearby grass that
our demonstrator was careful to avoid. “The
island's ecology is a big part of what we
focused on to make sure the island is livable
and breathable,” says game designer Andrea
Zanni. “We have land animals and sea
animals. They'll be there as threats, they'll be
there for you to utilise — you can go out into

the jungle and go hunting, which is all part
of Jason growing and surviving on the island.
If you go deep into the jungle, you're going to
have some encounters that may not be so
pleasant. So they're a part of the ecology of
the island, and really making the island this
savage place for the player.” Obviously, the
lizard we spotted near the caves is one such
creature, but it's a brief glimpse of sharks
circling bodies floating in clouds of blood
following the ship's explosion that sends
primal shivers vibrating through the spine.

Everyone we talk to hints that there's
a dark historv to the archipelago, although
they're coy about specifics. Regardless, it
seems to be spotted with enough inviting
caves, mysterious ruins, and abandoned
habitations that players will be itching to
explore. “It's about making sure that the
player is constantly feeling enabled by what

“It wasn't like we set out to
make it on an island, but we
wanted a lawless frontier”

vou can do in the world and enabled by the
world itself," says Keen. “You feel like the
world's inviting you to make you feel like
you constantly want to move through it,
constantly want to know more about
what's going on there. Recently, we put
a mineshaft just on the way down to a
lighthouse. And players heading to the
lighthouse see it, and everyone just goes, 'Oh
look, a mineshaft!' and they have to explore.
We want to constantly surprise people [with]
how much they're going to find when they do
go exploring and follow their nose."
Whatever players discover in Far Cry 3, it's
unlikely to be pleasant. Ubisoft Montreal has
crafted a space that hides what appears to be a
very dark heart not far beneath its beautiful
surface. Far Cry 3 may have left the weighty
themes of arms dealing and civil war behind,
but in their place is a more intimate tale of
madness and survival. And this story will
play out in a setting that retains the series’
unfashionable penchant for giving its players
genuine freedom in the age of the set-piece. €

Far Cry games — what's the connecting
thread that links them all together?

i's а raw experience, first and foremost.
In the Far Cry games, you're dealing with
rough tools, you're dealing with a place
that's remote — it's always distant, it's
always off the map. And, for us, we
wanted it to feel exotic. You think about
the types of weapons used: they're rough
weapons, they're not polished... They're
almost black market in some cases. You
think about the location: it's usually way,
way off the grid, and it’s almost like a
lawless frontier. So we knew we wanted
to start in that ре of place, and then the
other area that’s been the thing we want
to pull from is this feeling of discovery,

How much have you researched mental
disorders for the madness theme?

Quite а bit... We spent a ton of time
focusing on trying to make sure that we
had credible people in the world. We
actually went out and we talked to guys
who deal with these types of characters
for a living. There's a group of journalists
who, | don't know if you've seen the Vice
Guide To Liberia, or the Vice Guide to a
whole bunch of places, but they go out
and put themselves in harm's way. And in
order to make sure that we're making a
credible experience, that we're making
characters that are real - even though
they are insane — we sat down with these
guys and said here's what we got:
“We've got Vaas, we've got the doctor;
how do you feel about them?" And they
began to tell us stories about some of
people who they met, some of the unique
instances that they got into, and we were
like, “That sounds a lot like some of the
things that we have in the game.” Then
we put Vaas onscreen, and we put the
doctor onscreen, and we got a little
smile. They were like, "OK, yep, | feel
like I've met that guy...”

Will the insanity-themed moments be
integrated with the rest of the game?

For us, we wanted to offer discovery and
opportunity, so it's an offering. The key
thing is it's an offering. It was more about
the idea of: ‘OK, we want to be a great
shooter, and then we want to offer the
enticement of going in and going off the
rails a little bit. So we offer the palate
cleanse. You've been shooting for a
while, and Jason has that experience.

It can't be high-octane boss, boss, boss
all the time unless you've got something
that's in contrast to it. But if you're a
core shooter player and you want to

go mission to mission to mission [then]
you still have that opportunity.

Zip-lines link boats on
the shore. They're handy
in battle, but we've also
seen some that appear
to be placed to allow
for quick movement
around the islands

Far Cry 2's savannah was
perfect for its fire-based
gameplay, but the return
to islands linked by rivers
and ocean should offer
plenty of opportunities to
sneak up on unsuspecting
targets such as these

www.bit.ly'yDBBr9

Screenshot aallery

HITMAN:

ABSOLUTION
Can new abilities redeem a different
breed of Agent 47 for series fans?

Publisher
Developer
Format
Origin
Release

he mission is simple: rescue a young girl

from an orphanage that’s been overrun

by violent, masked mercenaries. But
when a representative trom IO Interactive
plays through this level twice in order to
demonstrate the breadth of strategy that
Hitman: Absolution will offer, the pair of
approaches we see couldn’t be more distinct.

The first time around, Agent 47 creeps and
skulks through the orphanage's blood-stained
halls, sticking to cover, crawling through air
vents, and taking care to avoid being spotted
by making timely dashes from point to point.
Eventually, 47 quietly subdues a guard and
hides the body in a laundry bin, stealing his
outfit in order to walk among the rest of the
hired killers undetected.

The second playthrough, however, is
carnage. Where before guards were overcome
with sleeper holds, now necks are snapped
and bones are broken in savage takedowns.
The stealthy 47 improvised his way from
room to room, throwing toys to distract his
foes, and borrowing syringe-based sedatives
found in the medical wing. His violent alter
ego is equally happy to make use of items left
lying around, but it's the fire axe he seems to
prefer. Previous titles saw 47 fumble up close
— at least when he wasn't attacking from
behind — but melee combat in Absolution

IO Interactrve

360, PC, I

Denmark

does a better job of preserving its star’s
proficiency. There’s a hint of QTE about
the takedowns, though, with split-second
slowdown telegraphing when it's time for
you to land the next blow.

Slowdown also features in a new gunplay
mechanic called ‘point shooting, which
explosively ends this second attempt at the
level. Functioning like Splinter Cell’s mark-
and-execute manoeuvre crossed with Red
Dead Redemption star John Marston's Dead
Eve, it sees 47 burst through a door before

Where before guards were
overcome with sleeper holds,
now necks are snapped

time slows, enabling our representative to
paint enemy targets. When time returns to
normal, we see the mercenaries torn apart in
a series of cinematic close-ups.

It’s very different kind of assassin we see
in each take on this compact, tightly designed
level, then. Which is appropriate, since our
demonstrations seem more focused on
showing off the upgraded abilities and
flex ibility of an empowered 47, rather than

гет гатар multiple тоте. (ез. аге, however, ©

RIGHT Bodies must be
hidden after a stealth
takedown, but there's
often somewhere nearby
to stash them, such as a
laundry basket, rubbish
chute or even, in one
case, a children's ball pit

ae ne

=
y i

HITMAN:
ABSOLUTION

47 might begin our demo in
this priest disquise, but it's
totally useless against the
mercs. It does, however,
suggest that the previous
checkpoint through the
orphanage's outer reaches will
have a more civilian focus

split into ‘checkpoints, each throwing up
distinct challenges.) The series’ backstory has
always had 47 аз a genetically superior man-
made assassin, but until now he’s only been
as dangerous as the player controlling him
was clever. His new abilities have moved him
more clearly beyond the realms of an ordinary
human. “What we're really trying to achieve
when players put the suit оп”, explains global
brand director Jon Brooke, “is that they feel
empowered, like they're in control of the
ultimate killing machine.”

There's still a range of tactical options
in the checkpoint we're shown, but in this
instance at least, they’re more tightly woven
around one another than the open sandbox
levels of past Hitman titles. Sneaky players are
offered that air vent rather than a backdoor,
for example, and overall the level we see
recalls the complex, layered interiors of one
of the more focused Deus Ex stages.

advantage of their distraction to sneak on by,

But within this narrower space, the game
is surprisingly responsive to every act you

however, and later the same three guards will
stroll back through the level, cracking jokes

make, Early on, 47 sneaks up on three of the about their victim and possibly catching you
mercs torturing a security guard. Save him, unaware as you try to hide. Later on, 47 hides
and he'll tell you where a shotgun is hidden in а body (and himself) in an empty wardrobe.
the level — and since you'd have tobe a rather While he's there, a guard wanders up —
direct assassin to take on three guards in the seemingly suspicious — only to pause to

first place, it’s an appropriate reward. Take urinate outside the door. And when 47's

* е

Narrative verdict

The grimy, gloss-free take on criminality exemplified by IO's
Kane & Lynch is also on show in Absolution. The orphanage
mission is a personal job for 47 - he's been sent to rescue the girl,
Victoria, by ex-handler Diana Burnwood. It was the latter's dying
wish, in fact, as shown in a trailer that reveals 47 was sent after
Diana by his own agency. The mercenaries, meanwhile, have
been hired by corpulent US businessman Blake Dexter, and are
led. by а limp-haired, unhealthy looking rival killer called Wade
(left). The dialoaue is profanity-laden.and graphic, too, with the
blackly comic tone of previous games less evident.

52 EDGE

10 is keen to emphasise a
Bourne-like ability to use
improvised tools. It seems
that 47's best improvisation
is done with pointier objects,
although he can throw items
he's found as a distraction

disguised as one of the masked thugs himself,
he manages to engineer a genuine case of
mistaken identity. Two mercs are patrolling a
room, so when one has his back turned, 47
puts the other in a sleeper hold and hides his
body. When the first guard turns around, he
carries on talking to 47 as if nothing were
amiss. It's all scripted, of course, but the
reactions Manage to convey a greater sense of
responsiveness than the clockwork levels of
old. The dynamic score, meanwhile, keeps
pace with the player, increasing in intensity
as 47's enemies draw near, and punctuating
potential threats, such as the lights in a room
being turned on, with jolting stabs.

Both playthoughs, but in particular the
stealthier one (which we’re told was up to
‘professional; not ‘silent assassin} standard),
rely heavily on 47's new Instinct powers. This
umbrella mechanic underlies most of the

While not especially
heavy on the viscera,
violence in Absolution is
communicated through
a grisly mixture of brutal
animation and wet,
crunching sound effects

gameplay elements in some form, and is
another way in which the focus has shifted to
47's heightened abilities. Being able to view
enemies through walls — their patrol route
extending from them as a burning trail —
breaks your immersion far less than the magic
map screen of Absolution’s forbearers. It gives
plavers the information they need to play a
lethal predator without trial-and-error
restarts, although it does shift the focus away
from route planning and towards moment -to-
moment positioning. Point shooting also uses
Instinct, which takes the form of a bar topped
up by ‘skillful play’ — such as takedowns — in
order to ration it. A less satisfying use of your
newfound power is tied to disguises: holding
the Instinct button will help avert suspicion
when 47 passes guards, which seems to
distract trom the focus on acting the part that
good disguise-based play should require.

чиш” "uum uu ШР‏ س

Situations such as this
one should help tempt
stealthier players
toward more violent
paths, adding a neat
optional moral dilemma
in a series that has
traditionally been as
amoral as its lead

But the nagging question remaining for

Absolution is simple: how much haven't we
seen? Both levels showcased so far have been
filled with alert foes (mercenaries in this
instance and cops in the E3 demo) and have
seen 47 creeping through places he’s not
supposed to be. Yet classic Hitman levels have
taken place in hotels, on suburban streets and
at parties — civilian environments where an
assassin can hide in plain sight — and it’s the
integration of Absolution’s new mechanics
with those levels that will be the game’s real
test. What’s more, the teasing end of the E3
demo, which saw 47 absorbed by a teeming
crowd, suggests that such levels could take
place on a scale bigger than anything we've
seen before. Since Absolution's core systems
appear as flexibly violent as a professional
assassin's skill set should be, we'd now like to
try them out for ourselves on a proper hit. №

Q&A

Tore Blystad

Did you deliberately set out to make more
of Agent 47's abilities?

It was a strong ambition when we started
the project. We had this character who
was supposed to be the ultimate assassin
and a really trained guy. And when you
actually played through levels, it didn’t
really feel that way. He wasn't that easy
to control and the mechanics didn't come
that naturally to the player. We stood
back and said, ‘If the game is much more
about him, this great assassin who you
can play, and [you can] perform the
moves without difficultly, then it'll become
much more about the consequences of
those actions and containing situations.’

Is that how point shooting evolved?
Coming back to 47 as a character, he's
Ihis expert assassin, he has every training
possible in his past. So of course he's an
expert marksman. He's good with
weapons. His signature weapons are
firearms. In previous games, they've
always been underplayed - going into
action it felt like things were falling apart.
We wanted shooting to feel like a natural
part of the game... Point shooting came in
as a way of giving something that would
be the extra icing on the cake for people
who choose to play in an action-
orientated way, combined with a strong
desire to make it as cinematic as we
could. We can't do that during normal
gameplay, but during point shooting the
player decides how to perform the action
and we try to ‘film’ that as cinematically
as we can, though you can skip through
it with the push of a button.

How do you stop levels descending into
bloodbaths too quickly?

In the old games, the Al had a hive mind:
when one attacked, they all did. But if you
fire a gun at any point in Absolution, the
sound range is, well, if you're inside

| think it's 30 or 40 metres. Beyond that,
the Al won't care. So if you start a
guntight in an area and you're able to
contain it, you've solved the situation.
And if you can hide the bodies so that no
one will find them later, you can go back
to stealth. So weapons have become
more powerful as a tool, you can use
them without destroying the entire setup of
a level. Also, the Al can defend positions.

How many levels are in civilian settings?
Most of scenarios in the game are civilian
levels, like in the last game. It's a big
focus for us to make levels and settings
that are uncommon, and where the
ambiance of the setting will tell a lot

of stories. You can't do that if you have
lot of secret bases

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AWARDS | 2011

GHOST ВЕСОМ:

FUTURE
SOLDIER

Ubisoft breaks cover and reveals its
variety show of a stealth shooter

Publisher
Developer
Format
Origin
Release

www.bit.ly/yAlsLk
Screenshot gallery

ccording to Ubisoft Paris level designer
Florent Guillaume, the process of

W making Ghost Recon: Future Soldier
"was an interesting way to work. There was
lots of prototvping, with levels like gameplay
blocks we could rearrange.” The truth of his
words becomes evident in our hands-on
session with the singleplayer campaign: no
two missions feel the same, and the most
polarised, and gripping, of those we dip into
are opposites in both pace and structure.

The first is a manic shootout through the
streets of Peshawar, Pakistan. With traffic at
a standstill, vou and your three fellow Ghosts
need to push through a miniature army of
enemv soldiers and panicked oncoming
civilians to reach the other end of the main
street. Vehicles can be used for cover, but the
aggressive enemies, many wielding shotguns
and hellbent on close-range kills, mean that
you have to keep vour blind spots under

Civilians react dynamically,
meaning their crazed dash is
unpredictable and alarming

careful observation. The best strategy, then,
is to make use of your gadgetry. Throw a
drone up into the air (selected with the D-pad
and launched like a grenade with a tap of the
left bumper) and vou can scan the area ahead
for hostiles. Its elevation needs to be
controlled via triggers to avoid detection, but
once you have the enemy in your sights a
press of the right bumper can tag up to four
units for your squadmates to prioritise or
eliminate simultaneously on your command.
Objective commands such as these and
orders to heal downed teammates are the only
directions you need to give your squad — they
will otherwise traverse the warzone of their
own accord, never breaking cover unless
ordered to do so. This means not having to
worry about AI foul-ups, or about pathfinding
mistakes that might screw up your game plan,
freeing you to focus on keeping yourself alive,
which is easier said than done. That's because
the Ghost Recon series' use of realistic levels
of player vulnerability has survived the leap to

this latest iteration, giving the game a sense
of threat that's rare in the genre outside of
the likes of Operation Flashpoint. There's also
the added factor of civilian casualties: if too
many die, then it's game over. Civilians react
dynamically, too, meaning their crazed dash
through the streets — like a scene from the
running of the bulls in Pamplona — is both
unpredictable and alarming.

Having taken down the immediate threats
in our recce of the level, there's the small
issue of a turret gunner blocking our path to
victory before a chopper evac and traditional
heli-gun section. To overcome this obstacle,
a downward tap of the D-pad fires up your
X-ray vision, allowing vou to snipe through a
vehicle and move on to the next phase of the
mission. If that sounds a little like science
fiction, the team remains adamant that it has
grounded its tech and tactics in realism. It
was even aided by a team of special forces
consultants during development of the game
(and, not least, the guiding hand of series
veteran Ubisoft Red Storm). If there's a bad
note in the Peshawar mission, it's the
helicopter gunning part. Less attractive than
those of previous games, and more tedious,
it's a break in the level's flow that comes off
as forced, its linearity clashing with the
open-ended feel of the preceding section.

The next mission we plunge into
couldn't be pitched further from the clear
and present danger of Peshawar. Set in а

deep forest that's dense with vegetation and
gorgeously detailed, there's a deadly silence to
the atmosphere that instinctively causes you
to take cover every step of the way. This is
when Future Soldier's camouflage system
comes into play. Staving in cover and moving
slowly causes vour stealth camouflage to kick
in automatically. If you’re detected or move
too briskly, you're plain for all to see. There's
a user-friendliness here that feels more casual
than the unforgiving nature of classic Ghost
Recon, but it's another thing less to worry
about as you creep and crawl through the
undergrowth, surveying enemy outposts
disguised as, and surrounded by, lumbervards.
Melee stealth kills come in handy on your
approach to the enemy bases and close-range ©

GHOSI
RECON:
FUTURE
SOLDIER

RIGHT Environments take in
everything from homages to
original Ghost Recon maps to
sprawling urban warzones,
BELOW RIGHT The visual design
is far less sci-fi-oriented than
that of ЕЗ 2010's demo; the
general idea is to keep the
narrative and feel as close to
Tom Clancy canon as possible

weapons prove integral to the claustrophobic
shootouts that erupt in a split second. Roadie
runs to and from cover are vital in the thick of
it, too, and the camera's bob and sway gives
the action a cinematic slant. The motion
capture of the Ghosts, with an alleged 2,500-
plus animations, also adds a level of realism

as you roll over and dive into cover.

The overall look of the game, however,
feels removed from the more gritty, hard-
edged and rather clinical look of previous
titles. Character models are chunky and
rounded, and the environments themselves
look far more colourful and inviting than the
cold, barren sterility of Ghost Recon: Advanced
Warfighter. There's a gloss to Future Soldier
that screams casual rather than hardcore,
which is perhaps a result of the military-
themed shooter's paradigm shift to narrative-
led, Hollywood-style thrills since Ghost
Recon's previous console outing in 2007.

Although the settings and style of the
two missions we see are vastly different, both
can be tackled with either strategic stealth or
gung-ho gunnery — there's no wrong way to
navigate Future Soldier's skirmishes and tackle
its threats. Plaving the scenarios with three
human squadmates will be the true test of the
game's strategic options and replay value, but

on this showing there's a variety to combat

that gives vou a strong sense of being in
charge without drowning vou in menus.

As a halfway house between action game

and military simulation, Future Soldier
simultaneously strikes the chords of
accessibility and depth that Operation
Flashpoint so fatally missed last vear. If the
rest of the missions on offer can build on the

* ik
What are ya building?
Gunsmith mode is a rifle range that allows you to test and create
weapons, the latter being done with parts earned through the
campaign. Bizarrely, it supports Kinect, too. Hand gestures flick
through weapon sets and dismantle guns for you to reassemble
as you please (providing you adhere to plausible combinations).
Shout ‘badass’ and you'll be provided with a randomised firearm
fit for a hero. In the range, your outstretched arm, fist clenched,
aims the weapon, while opening up your hand fires. Tilting left
or right moves you around. It’s entertaining, but after а few
minutes’ play you'll likely want to revert to a controller.

variety and scale that’s been demonstrated
here, Ubisoft might well be able to offer
something tor everyone. We do know,
however, that they're set to take place on an
international stage that includes Russia, and
with a few nods to classic Ghost Recon maps.

While Future Soldier may have been
designed as a cooperative experience, the
quality of the enemy and teammate AI is
strong enough to make it a considerable
proposition for lone players. As such, the
absence of a narrative in our time with the
game, even though it's never played a
prominent role in the series to date, is now
more noticeable. Future Soldier's vibrant new
aesthetic feels in dire need of a coherent
story to add some blockbuster intrigue to its
luscious looks, and hopefully the writers have
spun a Clancy-style yarn bold enough to
match its production values.

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ABOVE Cover may be
essential for survival, but
you needn't worry about
your squad. Their Al means
they will take the initiative
and guard their lives dearly.
RIGHT Launching a drone into
the skies gives you a better

tactical view of the situation.

Tagging enemies for your
men to sequentially or
simultaneously take down
is а blessing when you re
trapped behind enemy lines

While stealth and infiltration
are integral, there's a wealth
of big bangs and scorching
explosions on offer as well.
Firefights are tense affairs:
stay exposed for too long
and you'll soon find yourself
cut down by enemy bullets

What were your aims with Future Soldier?
The way we thought about the game was:
"We need to be faithful to what the brand
is — a smart shooter.’ We wanted to bring
back the flavour of the original Ghost
Recon; some levels are a tribute to that.
Another thing was that because we had
consultants who are former Navy Seals,
they gave us a new way of thinking what
a spec ops game is. We weren't making
a war game - these guys are often coming
to prevent war, [to] rescue and eliminate
people. Just talking to [the consultants]
was interesting and made us try to be
more realistic, bring it closer to their job,

Action games have placed a stronger
emphasis on narrative in the past few
years. How are you addressing this?

№5 at the heart of the experience we want
to give. We have seen how shooters have
evolved towards a more over-the-top
Hollywood style. But, for us, we can’t
imagine the Ghosts in London [as in

Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3] - that's
not Tom Clancy. We don't want to be
'me-too', we want to be faithful to Tom
Clancy. What is Clancy? Realism, as
much gameplay freedom as possible,

and trying not to be too over the top.

The setting is near-future — how did you
go about designing that world?

The technology of tomorrow in the world
of tomorrow is science fiction = it doesn't
show how Ghosts are unique today. So
the world of Future Soldier is the world of
today. If you are four guys against 50
and you can kill them with just a gun, it
means you're superior — you're not spec
орз. So in order to fight a large number,
you must be cleverer, have more
information and train hard. That's what
makes you special ops: to solve these
situations not only by shooting.

Why has there been such a big gap
between Advanced Warfighter 2 and this?
When we wanted fo renew the brand,
we needed to iterate. We made some
iterations that led us to a wall. Spending
months [developing] and then saying it
doesn't work, The E3 demo of 2010 was
а little bit too sci-fi. All this technology
wasn't easily understandable or real, the
setting wasn't exactly what we wanted,
we went too far with the exoskeleton and
stuff like that. We stepped back and said:
“We need a consultant.” The Al was also
key, We wanted an environment in which
the player could trigger the fight when
they wanted. We rewrote all the Al.
Another thing was co-op. If we had a
player-centric, scripted Al, it was
impossible with four players.

XCOM:
ENEMY

UNKNOWN
Sid Meier’s studio steps up to
tackle the alien invasion

Publisher
Developer
Format
Origin
Release

ou might have heard the outcry when
XCOM, a firstperson shooter based on

the turn-based alien-battling franchise,
was announced in 2010, It had been 16 years
since the original X-COM: UFO Defense (also
known as UFO: Enemy Unknown), and nine
years since the disappointing X-COM: Enforcer
limped into the world. Now the beloved series
was returning, but not in the way fans had
hoped. “Why aren't they making a turn-based
strategy game?’ the Internet howled.

It turns out someone was. Firaxis, creator
of the Civilization series, began work on
ХСОМ: Enemy Unknown in spring of 2007.
"Certainly there have been times where it's
been difficult to keep it a secret," explains
Jake Solomon, Enemy Unknown's lead
designer. “Maybe this is corny, but you like
to make people happy. I think the kick we
get as game developers 1$ giving people this
experience that makes them happy, and so
when you think you have something that 'll
make people happy, vou want to share that."

Solomon is sharing plenty now. XCOM:
Enemy Unknown isn't just ready to be
announced, but almost finished. It's playable
from beginning to end, and looks like
everything fans of the series have been pining
for. Once again, you're cast as the leader of an
international organisation established to fight
the aliens invading earth. Your duties span

everything from forward planning to day-
to-day minutiae, so you'll be in charge

of building and expanding your underground
base, researching new technologies and
equipment, and launching satellites to scan
the world for the alien menace. You'll also
shape your soldiers, deal with the shadowy
board of benefactors who fund your operation,
and take control of the ground combat against
the wildly strange aliens harassing the planet.

These are disparate elements, but the glory

of the original X-COM's experience was the

Your base is no longer
a top-down map, but a
bustling side-on ant farm

through-line it drew between your roles. A
choice made in your base would impact on a
skirmish you'd fight hours later. The game
forced you to make hard decisions in the face
of high stakes, and you'd lose yourself in the
fight for Earth as the hours flew by.

As Solomon shows us his version ot Enemy
Unknown for the first time, we get a look at
your new base. It's no longer a top-down map,
but a bustling side-on ant farm. Scientists are
tapping at computers in the labs, New recruits
are wandering the halls, exercising, playing

www. bit. ly/AFoGyz

screenshot gallery

XCOM's base has morphed
from a 2D blueprint into a
living place, with soldiers
scuttling from room to
room. The Geoscape is one
of many familiar elements
given a suitable makeover

Scenery items such as bus
stops and every wall in the
game can be destroyed by

your squad, but this isn't
Red Faction: for floors like
this, you must strike at
preset weak points

XCOM:
ENEMY
UNKNOWN

Firaxis’ intentions for XCOM:
Enemy Unknown are split. The
team are fans of the original,
desperate to maintain its
charm, permadeath, and scale,
At the same time, the game
needs to be modernised. That
means a sticky cover system
and bringing it to consoles

games, and visiting injured friends in the
infirmary. It looks like a beautiful 2D image,
but its 3D nature is revealed as the player
cycles through the menu and the camera
swoops inside these rooms. So you'll head
into the science lab to make decisions about
the next weapon technology to research, or
down to the barracks when you want to give
silly nicknames to vour soldiers.

When you're ready to fight, you visit
mission control. This looks like the Geoscape
from the original game, with the Earth
spinning in the vastness of space. It’s here you
can launch satellites to improve your ability to
detect aliens, scramble interceptors to attack
UFOs in the air, and load а Skyranger with up
to six soldiers to go and face the aliens.

When Solomon hops into ground combat,
things look even more like older X-COMs. The
camera 1s peering down upon a small group of
soldiers awaiting orders outside a petrol
station, and most of the world is obscured by
the fog of war. It looks good, if not stunning,
and there's a chunkiness to the characters that
evokes the low-res sprites of the original.

Each soldier in your squad can move and
perform a single action each turn, where an
action is anything from shooting their weapon
to tossing a grenade to any one of dozens of

Life cycle

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special abilities. You begin not knowing where
the aliens are, so Solomon starts by moving
his squad behind cover. The new cover system
makes his recruits duck automatically behind
the nearest piece of scenery. Almost
immediately, one spots a Sectoid.

Sectoids are the most iconic aliens from
the original X-COM, and look like pop
culture’s classic extraterrestrials: grey, small

As XCOM commander, part of your task will be managing your
specialised group of soldiers. You'll sculpt each of your recruits
by customising their appearance, giving them a name and a
nickname, and levelling them from a weak and panicky rookie
into an adept and wonderfully useful killing machine. The joy of
all the tough decisions involved is that they make you care, It's
painful, therefore, when you lose a recruit, especially since death
is not merely penalised in Enemy Unknown, but permanent. It's
almoswalways your-fault fonmakinga poon.decision, and losing

a recrüit can.jee! like a favourite toy being broken.

Firaxis has spent a long
time on XCOM's aliens. The
Sectoids were a challenge,
and early versions made
Sid Meier uncomfortable,
because he said they made
it feel like shooting at kids

and skinny with big, slick heads and shining
eves. When the soldier spots them, a three-
second, in-engine cutscene calls attention to
their arrival. It's a small use of the Unreal
Engine 3 that powers the game, and one of a
few concessions to the cinematic gaming
world into which XCOM is being reborn.

Back on the ground, one of the Sectoids
moves inside the petrol station, while another
ducks behind a nearby car. Solomon's sniper
is carrving special equipment that lets her
grapple on top of objects, and he moves her
onto the roof above the petrol pumps. He then
tells his heavy soldier to lay down suppressing
fire to keep the Sectoid in place behind the
car, and has another toss a grenade inside the
vehicle. It explodes, and the camera cuts in
close for a second time to show the explosion.

Classes are another big change to XCOM.
Equipment still plays an enormous part in

|
| CHOOSE RE SF ARCH

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„ ALIEN WEAPON FRAGMENTS

A heavy soldier typically
carries a large machine gun
and has a rocket launcher
strapped to his back. This
makes him perfect for
suppressing Sectoids while
the rest of your squad flanks

defining the role of each squad member, and

you continue to need to micromanage what
your team is carrying, but your soldiers are no
longer defined by an enormous list of stats.
Instead, each recruit has a class (heavy, sniper,
assault and support), a small number of
statistics that increase automatically, and a
selection of special abilities, which the player
chooses each time the soldier levels up. The
aim isn’t to make the game less complicated,
but to find a way to introduce more abilities
and complexity than before and still make
sure players understand the consequences of
the decisions they’re making.

With the Sectoids now dealt with, one of
the recruits moves inside the petrol station.
Another short cutscene plays when he spots
Mutons inside. These are effectively gorillas

in shoulder-pad spacesuits, and mugli.tougher.

and more aggressive than the Se@toids

Research lets you unlock
access to new kit, such as
the grapple hook suit that
lets snipers climb rooftops.
Your scientists can also
reverse engineer alien
tech from crashed UFOs

Solomon slaughtered. One of the Mutons fires
and instantly takes out the recruit, which
means he's gone for good (see ‘Life cycle’).
Fortunately, permadeath isn't the only
returning core feature in Enemy Unknown. The
world you're fighting for is as destructible as
ever. Solomon tells his heavv soldier to fire a
rocket launcher at the side of the petrol
station, and the entire wall crumbles. The
sniper, still waiting patiently on the rooftop,
now has direct line of sight to the Mutons
inside, and takes them both down in a couple
of turns. This was an easy mission, and still
another name was added to the memorial
room back at base. Firaxis' own mission is
much harder, however: to satisfy fans of the
original X-COM, recreate it for a modern
audience, and bring its full experience to

„sonsolss. From aging ibis thin slice of the
“gone, it seems ftans tjus wid the gat Ш

Q&A

Jake

Solomon
|

When did you play the original X-COM:
Enemy Unknown?

| was 18, and | came to ita little bit after
it was out, '94 or "95. My brothers and |
were big game players, so late at night
we'd sneak downstairs and take turns for
one hour, It just totally blew my mind, and
since | was going to college the next year,
that's why | went into computer science.
Even once | had my degree, | didn't really
think about game development until later
on, when | got this opportunity with
Firaxis, which was kind of out of the blue.

How did you end up becoming Sid
Meier's right-hand man?

| think it probably started out with me
pestering him. | like to think Sid saw
something in me, but that's totally not true.
| was always giving him feedback, and
we have this great relationship, because
I'm really coarse and loud and obnoxious,
and Sid is quiet and just the nicest person
on the face of the Earth. We have this
relationship where I'm talking and being
loud and Sid's always like, [whispers]
"OK, calm down." On [Civilization
Revolution] and on Pirates!, he really
started to help me form my own design
instincts and then, coming on to this
project, he's been my mentor. | go back
to him all the time. I'm now at the point
where | can basically hear his voice in
my head, which is probably not healthy.
He tells me to hurt people. [Laughs.] But
no. Brian Reynolds and Soren Johnson
and |, we all say the same thing, which
is that he's the smartest, most amazing
guy we've ever met. It's one thing to be

a designer, and it's another to meet Sid
and be like, ‘OK, now that's a designer.’

What did you learn from bringing
Civilization Revolution to consoles?

Civ Rev is very much a lighter, faster
version of Civilization, but with XCOM
you're going to get the full experience.
Because, when it comes to input, XCOM
is not particularly complicated. | don't
feel the need to streamline any aspects
of gameplay, because [your] interaction
with the game experience is still simple.

Do you think there's a big audience

for turn-based games on consoles?

| think the audience exists, and we did
pretty good numbers with Civ Rev. XCOM
is not like any other game, so it’s hard to
make those hard comparisons, but it's a
question of do people want this deeper
experience? | think they do. Regardless,
we're not going to change the design
philosophy based on the platform. If we
feel something is going to make the best
game, that's what we're going to do.

ANTICHAMBER
Up is down and down is up in
this non-Euclidean labyrinth

Publisher | Alexander Bruce
Developer Alexander Bruce
Format Fi
Origin | Australia
Release | 2012

T
Г |
| |

any games have drawn visual
inspiration from Dutch artist
MC Escher
mathematics-inspired works, but few have

's oeuvre of intricate,

attempted to wholly immerse you in the
mind-bending aesthetic geometry of such

a world. Firstperson puzzler Antichamber is
one such game. Indie developer Alexander
Bruce has spent the past two vears travelling
the globe showing oft his passion project at
festivals and submitting it to competitions.
Make Something Unreal ultimately
kickstarted the game's development and
funding, granting Bruce $25,000 to get the
ball properly rolling. "They were pretty
impressed with how I'd bastardised£heir

engine," he tells us. But there's another

bonus to be wrought from Bruce's tactic of
carpet -bombing industry events: free focus
testing. "Antichamber ended up where it is as
a result of watching thousands of people play
the game at festivals. Every time the game was
showcased at an event, Га have an intense
several davs of watching everyone who plaved,
half watching the screen and half reading their
faces while I tried to work out what was going
on in their heads. After each event, I would
then spend several months addressing all of
the issues that Га seen, before putting the
game back in front of more people at another
festival and repeating the process."

If the concept of an art-game crossover
has you philosophising, holdithose thoughts
because the rame has sone built-in

philosophy of its own to greet you the
moment you enter its cerebral air space. The

premise is simple: navigate Antichamber's
maze following (or rather deciphering) the
instructions that appear before each puzzle
section. Mounted on walls and consisting of
a (usually analogous) diagram and some
cryptic text, Antichamber's hints cunningly
masquerade as part of the puzzle itself.
Though the tasks themselves are mostly
linear, you have the option of hopping
between chambers, opening multiple areas
of the unified gameworld at will. A tap of the
escape key allows you to reset a chamber by
seamlessly ejecting vou to the game's black-
and-white hub, which consists of three
interactive walls (hosting game settings, e

m
& w^ =

3 =; и -

ANTICHAMBER Ё

A nuanced soundscape
punctuates the experience. The
ambient sounds and jarring
mix of earthy noises — from
waterfalls to birds tweeting —
hint at a world beyond your
journey through the labyrinth

а map and the wall-mounted images/text
you've come across so far), with a fourth side
looking out on one of the game's corridors.
It's a simplistic, striking fusion of menu

and gameworld.

А ‘gun; if you can call the device that, is
introduced a few puzzles into the game and
allows vou to pick up and place small cubes
— the game's keys and primary tools — on
any surface. You'll use cubes frequently: as
stepping stones to hop over walls, say, or as
door-stops. They're an odd spin on a simple,
everyday form factor; a metaphor, if we were
to take Bruce's philosophical eye on things,

Antichamber's frontend
has its own aesthetic – à
; я hub of game options that
perspective. One puzzle forces you to contrasts starkly with the

for the game's own skewing of conventions.
Antichamber plays heavily with

intentionally look away from your destination blinding white of the
game world. It serves as а

so as to keep a door open, while another has serene sanctuary from all

vou transforming your surroundings by the mindgames you'll face

staring into windows of colour, consequently

changing the room you're in. The idea, as far as what the player has to do to Perspective, of course, is crucial to
Bruce explains, is to challenge players’ overcome them. They're only difficult much of Escher's work, but the splashes of
preconceptions. "Most of the gameplay in because thev're designed to constantly block colour also bring to mind the likes of
Antichamber involves throwing scenarios at work against what the player expects. First, last year's seminal Move title Echochrome II
the player that go against everything they've it's toving with their expectations of how (another game that took inspiration from the
come to understand from conventional games the game should work based on other 20th-century artist and played with space and
to see how thev deal with the situation," games, and then it starts toying with their point of view). Then, of course, there's the
he says. “I wouldn't say that any of the expectations based on what they've had obvious comparison to Valve's puzzle-room
challenges are particularly difficult, to do in the game previously.” opus, Portal. Bruce prefers to discuss the

visual design of the game in terms of its
relevancy to the experience rather than its

Antechamber

The game's title derives from the term ante-room, meaning
'room before'. The term is often applied to theme parks, where
an antechamber is used to inform visitors of the rules of the
ride. There are many ways to read this meaning into the game,
built as it is of rooms leading into other rooms and filled with
instructional text and images. Antichamber is a series of waiting
rooms leading on to the next challenge, each preparing you by
challenging your understanding of the gameworld's rules. Each
of the game's instructional texts and images are gathered in

the black-and-white hub, accessed with a tap of the escape key.

similarity to any other titles, however: "The
world itself 1$ so minimal because once you
start messing around with the player's head
vou very quickly discover how important it is
to remove anything that could distract [them].
For quite a long time, people kept looking at
bugs in the game and thinking thev were
puzzles, or solving puzzles and thinking

they'd broken the game. It's pretty difficult

Ae ED x E

Antichamber's world
is a horrendous tease,
giving through-glass
glimpses of what lies
ahead. Whether you
actually make it there
will depend on your
motoneuron skills

to make a game like this feel right without
running into either of those problems.”

As we delve deeper into Antichamber,
from leaps of faith from neck-breaking
heights to revisiting areas that have warped
into new spaces since our previous visit,

there are moments where frustration creeps
into its cerebral challenges. The enigmatic
messages littering the halls can confuse as
often as clarify. But the game’s difficulty
usually rests with your own lack of
interpretative skills rather than any botched
design. The game therefore plays particularly
well with company, even though there are no
multiplayer modes — a fresh set of eves and
ears to absorb the clues can help hugely. To
broaden the game’s appeal, it would benefit
from a more user-friendly hint system, but
then that would also neuter the sense of
bewilderment Bruce hopes to instil.

[f the game enters the retail space (it’s
currently planned for PC download only,
although the possibility of home console
versions hasn't been ruled out), one issue
facing Antichamber is replay value. Once
vou've successfully unlocked the secret to
a section, it can be unappealing to do so
again, with the endorphin rush of
uncovering a gameplay twist depleted.

If Antichamber's visual hook and
sensibility — rewarding brain rather than gun
power — suggest it's part of the emergent
Portal me-too movement, think again: this is
а project with its own distinct flavour, one as
finely crafted and varied in its puzzles as it
is gloriously unbounded in its avant garde
artistic flair. If Antichamber's tightrope walk
between confusion and innovation can live
up to its bedroom coder's grand ambition,
it could be another indie success story. B

Q&A
Alexander
Bruce

Which games influenced the development
of Antichamber?
One of my favourite game series is
Metroid for how it deals with exploration,
and | think there have been some pretty
strong influences from that throughout
the game. The early phases of the game
feel much more like Braid or Portal,
because of their exploration of unusual
mechanics, but as the game keeps getting
deeper it becomes much more about
using new tools to overcome previous
challenges in the environment.

In general, the games that interest
me the most are the ones that solved
a problem that didn't exist before they
were created, So with games like Braid,
Portal, Fez and Miegakure, they started
with interesting questions about time,
navigation, perception or 4D space, and
then answered them as completely as
they could, | started with questions about
mutable geometry and non-Euclidean
space, and in the process of finding
answers as to why they were interesting
concepts, ended up addressing the even
more interesting ideas of psychology and
expectations within modern games.

Although it's abstract in its delivery, there
does seem to be a narrative thread
related to a relationship in the game.
Can you tell us more about this element?
Antichamber is a game about coming

to terms with a world that you don't

fully understand. | guess you could say
it's about growing up as well, because
at the same time that the game was
being developed, | was trying to work out
what the hell | was doing on a personal
level as well. I've been on a bit of an
emotional rollercoaster throughout the
development, and have had to change
course several limes.

How did you focus-test the game?
Since you're the sole designer, was it
all done purely through feedback at
festivals and conferences?
Festivals and conferences are never
the best environments for people to play
a game in, but the reason that method
worked so well lor me was because
it ensured that the moment-to-moment
gameplay was consistently holding
the player's interest. If you can have
someone sit down at a busy event and
play for an hour and a half, despite
all of the distractions going on around
them, it becomes pretty clear that
things are working.

l've spent quite a lot of time and
money testing the game by travelling
around the world with it, but | view it
all as a pretty worthwhile investment.

RIGHT Although limbs
remain attached to bodies
and heads don't fly off
shoulders, Team Ninja has
by no means held back
from delivering buckets of
blood throughout Ninja
Gaiden 3. Swords get
jammed partway through
opponents’ torsos and the
sound design rams home
some stomach-churning
squelches and cries

BELOW Hayabusa's new
nemesis evokes an
Illuminati leader rather
than anything of eastern
origin, a reminder that
Team Ninja is shooting for
wider appeal with its first
Itagaki-free series entry

NINJA
САТОЕМ 3

Have Itagaki’s students
become masters?

Publisher
Developer
Format
Origin
Release

есто Кое
Team Ninja
300, РЗ
Јарап

Е
“LL .

www. bit. yiwCSw4E

| v E ee 1 =
Screenshot gallery

hen we previously drew blood in
Ninja Gaiden 3 (E234), we took a
stab at a portion of the opening

London-set chapter, Back then, Team Ninja’s
new boss, Yosuke Hayashi, seemed to be
steering the series toward relentless QTEs and
arcade-stvle accessibility. While a complete
run-through of the level reinforces the notion
that this is Ninja Gaiden gone casual, it's the
second stage — set in a Middle-Eastern desert
citv — that honours the hardcore philosophy
of Hayashi's mentor, Tomonobu Itagaki.

In its final form, then, and with book-
ending cutscenes in place to offer some
exposition, the opening section feels like
an introduction to Ryu Hayabusa tor the
uninitiated, with the ninja/bodybuilder now a
god among men, as opposed to a god among
demons. Meanwhile, the plot — Hayabusa is
called on to eliminate a shadowy group of
terrorists in a globe-trotting varn — draws on
blockbuster films as opposed to eastern myth.
But in Team Ninja's bid to cater to a western
palate, it seems it has removed much of the

Move over

series' supernatural allure, replacing it with
action movie staples. Though Ayane does
make an early, fleeting cameo, it's unclear how
firmly Ninja Gaiden 3 will stay rooted to its
past, and whether the writers and designers
have the chops (or desire) to match the beasts
and beauty of Itagaki's legacy.

The action-flick riff flows into the start of
the second stage, when Hayabusa is imparted
the crossbow by his governmental minders,
establishing a James Bond’s Q-esque dynamic
that rings hollow for a character who's always
been an army of one. It’s also jarring but
pleasing to find the second chapter so
divergent in challenge and style to the first.
There are fewer scripted events, more worthy
opponents, and bright, uncluttered spaces in
which to carve up your foes. It’s a direct
contrast to the linear-yet-confusing London
streets, where a hurdle to slide under or wall
to awkwardly scale lurks behind every corner.

Though there are fewer set-piece QTE
moments in the second chapter, button
prompts remain a cornerstone of combat. You

PlayStation Move controls once again prove a lacklustre
alternative for anyone looking for fresh ways to play. Simply
waggling the controller lunges Hayabusa into his flurries of
attack, neutering any sense of achievement, and lacking both
precision and challenge. Nintendo recently showed how to build
а game around motion controls with Skyward Sword, so it's а
shame Team Ninja hasn't capitalised on the Move controller's
responsiveness and potential to serve Hayabusa's slicing and
dicing. In this case, Move compatibility feels more like a
marketing bullet point than a thoughtful design decision.

Combat is both fast
and aggressive, so it's a
shame that it's slowed by
the designer's theatrical
tastes, with a lurching,
disorienting camera

can remove the prompts in the settings, but
the pauses and erratic camera moves remain
constant. Even easy grunt kills are slowed
down, zooming the camera in to emphasise
the result of steel slicing skin. The slick
camera proves disorienting, however. It's
forgivable in a one-on-one skirmish, but
infuriating when you're outnumbered.

Initially, this cinematic approach feels like
a guiding hand from the designers, a way to
sidestep some of the blind-spot issues that
plague other action games, but it soon
becomes tiresome. Persevere and dice enough
enemies, however, and you're granted a special
attack. Holding down triangle initiates a
three-man killing spree that sets Hayabusa’s
blade on a seemingly random trio of
opponents. This further complicates any
attempt at strategy, seeing you dragged from
foe to foe and unable to steer the flow of the
action. It’s cinematic, but disengaging.

Though such mechanics obscure the
simple joys of painting the town red, Team
Ninja has made some fine revisions to the
Ninja Gaiden formula, Arrows can be fired
more accurately in midair and orbs no longer
flutter about the screen (though the Ki meter
builds with each kill and counter as always).

For better or worse, the Ninja Gaiden
mould has been shaken up, but there are signs
that the team isn't entirely betraying its
legacy. If the finished product builds, level to
level, as these initial chapters do — from
mundane to challenging — Ninja Gaiden 3
could yet carve up the competition.

ABOVE Paul Phoenix has
been hardest hit by the
transition from 3D to
SFXT's comic-book style,
his build presumably over-
emphasised to set him
apart from Street Fighter
counterpart Ken Masters.
RIGHT While Street Fighter
veterans often associate
the dragon punch with the
end of a combo, here it's
just the beginning. Tag in
а partner by pressing both
medium attacks and the
combo can continue

www.bit.ly/zNZoQG

Art and screenshot gallery

STREET
FIGHTER
A TEKKEN

Poised to be the king of crossovers —
if Capcom gets the balance right

Publisher
Developer
Format
Origin
Release

РТЫ

PLAYER)

Tekken characters’
special moves stay
true to their roots by
mapping follow-ups
to subsequent inputs.
Julia, say, can follow
a Wind Roll with
three other moves

a
PLAYERI _ 4 x
А a = sl | | | jæ LJ | Е ый em

ne уеаг on from our first look at
Capcom’s once-unthinkable crossover
| between two of the most revered
fighting game series in history, the company’s
gradual drip of announcements has left us
with a roster of 35 characters, though rumours
indicate that the final count may well be
nearer 50. While there’s time for it to change,
then, the current impression is that this
might as well have been called Street Fighter
IV X Tekken: on the Capcom side, just three
of the 18 confirmed fighters are absent from
the SFIV roster. It’s little surprise given that
the game runs in the same engine, but long-
standing series fans might feel entitled to a
wider representation of its 25-year history
than Street Fighter II's Hugo and Poison,

and Rolento from Alpha 2.

Few of the most recent Tekken side
announcements raised eyebrows: series
stalwarts Paul Phoenix and Marshall Law were
such obvious inclusions that they might as
well have been announced alongside the game
at Comic-Con 2010. Capcom has mere weeks

Crossover appeal
Series fans may remember Street Fighter Alpha's Dramatic
Battle, in which Ryu and Ken fought final boss M Bison
simultaneously. Street Fighter X Tekken takes that engaging
conflict a step further with Scramble, a fourplayer mode with

, all characters onscreen at once. It's chaotic stuff, of course, but
there's clearly potential for creative, extensive combos. You
can also team up in Paired Battle, which plays out like a normal
fight, with each player controlling a single character. That's
going to take more than a little bit of practice, so the inclusion
of an online training mode is most welcome indeed.

to announce the remainder of the roster, and
the safe money’s on Tekken's Jack and Street
Fighter's Akuma, with a recent trailer revealing
Mega Man and, bizarrely, Pac-Man. They,

like Infamous protagonist Cole McGrath and
Sony Japan mascots Toro and Kuro, will be
exclusive to Sony platforms.

The Capcom characters are largely
unchanged from their Street Fighter [V
incarnations, a logical consequence both of
the desire to ensure SFIV players make the
switch and of the amount of work required
to fit characters from a 3D brawler in a 2D
setting. Capcom appears to have struck a fine
balance, ensuring the Tekken cast fit the Street
Fighter style while still feeling like themselves.

Producer Yoshinori Ono wants to expand
the fighting game's audience, which means а
host of mechanics aimed at new players that
will also help Tekken players make the switch.
There are two simplified control schemes:
one aimed at beginners, with special moves
mapped to single directions, and one based
on Tekken’s directional taps, with diagonal

Stages change over the
course of a match, with
fighters sometimes
jumping to lower levels
for different backgrounds.
By the final round, this
level is illuminated by
the neon-rigged trucks

inputs removed. Both mean lower damage
output and a reduced moveset, but beginners
can start out with controls they feel
comfortable with and gradually work their
way up to the regular control scheme.

Then there’s the gem system, which when
first announced seemed like a way of racking
up preorders; different retailers will offer
different gems, with a purchase of the special
edition the only way to guarantee the full set
on launch day. Players choose five gems before
the match begins, and they're split into two
categories: boost and assist. The former gives
experienced players increased speed, health or
damage, while the latter is aimed at beginners,
automatically blocking attacks or teching
throws. Boost gems have to be activated by
meeting certain conditions during a round,
and assists come at a cost: using auto-block
depletes your Cross Gauge by a third.

[t’s still a concern, particularly given that
you're not told which gems your opponent is
using, and with 55 to choose from, there's а
risk of something game-breaking being found
once they're in the hands of millions. But
Street Fighter X Tekken feels wonderful, a
faster-paced, more attack-minded game than
Street Fighter IV, with intriguing possibilities
in its tag-heavy combo system and its
concessions to newcomers well thought out
and balanced. Street Fighter ГУ catapulted
fighting games back into the mainstream, but
favoured depth over accessibility. If Capcom
can strike a balance between the two, it could
be on to something truly special. №

Aerial combat has
featured heavily in early
looks at Uprising, but the
transition between flying
and on-foot sections
seems to cleverly mesh
with the weapons system,
forcing you to pick arms
carefully before levels

This three-headed dragon
is Hewdraw, a boss that
appears in chapter three.
The order in which you
defeat its first two heads
changes the dialogue
spouted by the last

KID ICARUS:
UPRISING

Nintendo's most cherubic character
stars in a punishing shoot ‘em up

Publisher fi ntende
Developer Project Sore
Format |
Origin
Release

As well as a game loop
that encourages replay,
there's an emphasis on
multiplayer combat in
Uprising that should
see it in consoles long
after the credits roll

zs]

Medusa's hordes see
Nintendo on impressive
visual farm, conjuring all
sorts of bizarre beasts
and homages to the NES
title that gave life to Pit

or a game that presents itself as a
Saturday morning cartoon, Kid Icarus:
Uprising is an alarmingly hardcore shoot
‘em up. It’s at a stroke more challenging than
the straightforward flag grabs of Mario’s
primary-coloured platformer worlds, more
consistently frenzied than anything Samus
Aran would encounter, and a far cry from the
relative placidity of Link’s usual haunts. Yes,
Nintendo has found a new and gruelling niche
in which to place one of its most malleable
and least recognisable icons. Pit, it has
decided, is the Nintendo character who'll
reduce you to a shrivelled, defeated mess.
Uprising is designed to be replayed, with
each chapter goading you into gambling your
accumulated score against a chosen difficulty
level. These chapters are split into an initial
Sin And Punishment-style on-rails shooter
section, before culminating in an on-foot,
free-roaming action runabout. The former
is a sort of After-Burner-meets-Greek-
mythology affair, with Pit screaming through
luscious, rolling cloudscapes and soaring his
way over beautifully rendered, scorched
battlefields. The latter is in thirdperson beat
‘em up form, with full camera control handed
to the plaver and a more varied and tactical
array of combat options.

= E
Raising the barcode
Kid Icarus: Uprising will come furnished with a three-versus-three
competitive multiplayer mode, as well as a free-for-all Battle
Royale option. But perhaps more interesting is the game's
integration of 3DS's augmented-reality capabilities. A number
of character cards will be made available (Nintendo hasn't yet
made clear haw), which, when placed next to each other on a
flat surface, will produce 3D models of in-game characters, which
will then proceed to brawl. Outcomes to these scraps appear
pre-canned, but it will at least help settle playground disputes
over whether angel Pit is tougher than goddess Palutena.

Uprising not only
comes with its own
cast of eyeball-heavy

| goons to defeat, but
you can expect to

| see cameos from the

. Metroid franchise make
an appearance, too

Your choice of weapon, from one of nine
basic categories, dictates how these two
sections play out. Head into the on-rails
[lying sections wielding the melee-centric
club and you'll find yourself at a disadvantage.
Once on the ground, however, the club's ability
to clobber with extreme prejudice comes into
its own. Within the nine basic categories exist
dozens of different individual weapons. The
gunblade categorv, for example, hosts the light

Pit is the Nintendo character

who'll reduce you to a

shrivelled, defeated mess

and agile samurai blade, the multi-shot-firing
burst blade and the poisonous viper blade,
each carrying a unique aesthetic and bespoke
animations. Weapons are bought and sold, as
well as discovered inside well-guarded chests,
and it's the rarity of those powerful weapons
that drives the game's replay value.

Uprising's cast is one of Nintendo's most
bizarre. A Groucho Marx face that shoots
bombs from its nostrils sits alongside a three-
tiered scallop tea tray with orbiting, laser-
firing pearls. It's HR Giger meets CBeebies

and it's fascinating just to see what oddness

is thrown at you next. Most chapters conclude
with weird bosses, such as the three-headed
Hewdraw, whose personality changes based on
which heads you lop off.

Gambling more hearts at a chapter's
outset increases your ability to procure better
weapons. A sliding difficulty scale allows you
to set your challenge level. Go low and you're
effectivelv paving hearts for an easier ride. Go
high and you're risking your hearts for bigger
jackpots. Failure drops the difficulty level and
loses you a chunk of the pot.

The highest difficulty setting demands
supernatural reaction times, too. It's mind-
smearingly difficult: with the top screen a
masochistic, bullet-hell mess, we haven't
vet lasted 30 seconds. There's real lasting
challenge for all skill levels and increasing
rewards for playing right on the edge of
vour comfort level.

There are still issues with Uprising's
control system, specifically during the
on-foot sections, where the touchscreen is
used to rotate the camera around Pit. The
method is unintuitive, requiring a few hours'
play before it feels natural. Once you've
mastered them, though, Uprising’s controls
are remarkably swift and precise, and feel
entirely appropriate for the acrobatic Pit.

It's ironic that Nintendo has placed its
most innocent and cherubic star in a game so
punishing in its arcane control method and
relentlessly spiralling difficulty. Whatever
mystical force inspired Pit's re-emergence,
he's carried with him a daunting whiff of old-
school challenge, a gruelling sort of stuffy
retro miasma. You can soar through the game
if vou like, but when it's finally released,
Uprising will want to make you crawl. B

DIRT
SHOWDOWN

Codemasters’ renowned series

spins off into full-contact territory

Publisher Codemasters
Developer | in-house
Format 360. PC. P53
Origin
Release

Showdowns events
take place against
a wide range of
weather effects. The ©
loss of grip in snowy
environments adds
to the mayhem of
demolition derbies

Every event in Showdown
is designed to be just that:
an event. Look beyond
the foreground's sparking
metal and flying debris
and you'll see cruise
liners and big wheels
shimmering in the
distance, as schools of
circling paragliders enjoy
views of the auto carnage
unfolding below them

Grid racers should

be familiar with the
Yokohama Docks. They
feature in Showdown
as the home of a
Gymkhana arena three
times larger than Dirt 3's
Battersea power station

ith the exception of zombie party

cars and the luminous polystyrene
blocks designed purely for
extravagant obliteration in Dirt 2's
Gatecrasher and Dirt 3’s Gymkhana modes,
Dirt is a series predicated on a strict non-
contact rule set. For all the franchise's recent
'extreme' inclusions, Codemasters has never
strayed from the clean race ideology
established in 1998's Colin McRae Rally;
merely grazing a wooden post at high speeds
can all too often throw a vehicle into a
catastrophic tailspin. Frenzied sideswipes
in head-to-head battles by autoists with
fantasies of Burnout's signature takedowns,
meanwhile, are as likely to retire the aggressor
as they are the victim, second chances granted
by rewind tool Flashback notwithstanding.
But comprehensive data-mining of Dirt
3's user-progress statistics has helped
Codemasters discover untapped potential in
Dirt's worn tyre treads: an audience content
to plav with nothing but the easiest settings,
who feel most at home in the busier, multi-

car game types. As the cries for more
demanding rallying ramped up online during
Dirt 3's qualifying days, players voted in

a different manner in-game.

To purify these muddied waters, Dirt has
now been cleft in two. Dirt 3's true successor
will make a pit stop to siphon off those
features deemed too indulgent, before driving
back down the rallying path of its ancestors.
That leaves the Showdown series as the new
vehicle for the discarded modes as well as a
test track for other luxuries.

One thing clearly missing from Showdown's
blueprints is any mention of contact -free
racing, as evidenced in a hectic eight -buggy
Baja sprint around a dusty desert circuit.
Gone is the need to gently feather the throttle
to ease 1,300kg of angry car around corners.
In Showdown the tyres bite with extra vigour
to take turns with Ridge Racer flamboyance,
but if the engine has been overcooked prior to
a hairpin you can use an opponent's side as a
kicker to negotiate the bend safelv. Motorised
bushwhacking is positively encouraged.

From the hearse’s mouth

Dirt has never been a series to shy away from vehicular carnage,
but events such as demolition derbies have seen safety belts
unclipped and the full force of the EGO engine's damage system
let loose for the first time. It's possible for cars to be ripped clean
in two (then pieced back together courtesy of the renamed
Crashback reverse button), a feature that has forced Codemasters
to ease back on officially licensed vehicles in favour of bespoke
varieties. Hearses are promised, but for reasons no more sinister
than providing peculiar frameworks to be fed through the
physics wringer — FlatOut 2-style ragdoll drivers are a no-no.

Mounds of tyres, deadly impediments
in Dirt 3, are now strewn about the racetrack
along with boxes and barrels with almost
careless abandon. All are begging to be
scattered by a speeding bumper.

Showdown's excessive pageantry wouldn't
be complete without the obligatory boost
button synonymous with the underground
scene of The Fast And The Furious
generation. Here it sits snugly within a
relaxed control system where drifting is easy
to initiate and maintain, and in race modes
where performance is judged on aggression
as much as it is on composure.

These rubble-strewn jostles to the
finishing post come in familiar elimination,
domination and standard flavours, yet make
up just the quietest third of Dirt Showdown's
three-pronged assault on motorised mayhem.
The other two keystones of Showdown's
curriculum vitae are its Hoonigan and
demolition derby events, the first an
expanded take on Gymkhana with multi-car
stunt challenges, the second a respectful nod
back to Reflections' Destruction Derby brand.

Whatever your take on Dirt's recent
destinations, the unexpected diversion along
the highway to Grid 2 should be heralded with
the carnival spirit depicted in its frenzied
events: it’s either the game that promises to
bring years of childhood Hot Wheels play
sessions to life, or the filter through which all
of Dirt’s garish events have been extracted.
Like or loathe the style, the Codemasters
garage knows how to tune up a fine racer. №

FULL HOUSE

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FULL HOUSE

THE UNTOUCHABLES

Concluding our critical look at the stone-cold classics of gaming, stripping
away the veneer of perfection to reveal the tar more interesting truth beneath

be a fine way of circling their achievements. Having

already picked apart Half-Life 2, Rez and Grim Fandango,
three more classics are now in the firing line. They are:
Halo, the acceptable and universally acclaimed face of the
space marine shooter; Resident Evil 4, arguably the finest,
most meticulous and most generous thirdperson shooter to
date; and Super Mario Galaxy, the true successor to the
game that taught us how polygons should run and jump.
Each is a masterwork and an inspiration to developers.

| ooking for а game's flaws, as we discovered in E237, can

What all of these games have in common is that they
know exactly what they’re doing. Despite all the prototypes,
delays and transformations they went through, their
founding principles held firm. It's for this reason that these
games, maybe even more than last month's, tell us as much
about their parent companies’ culture and values as they do
their technology and craft. Their flaws, if vou can call them
that, exist at an almost genetic level. Strip them out and
vou risk losing a whole lot more than you might gain — à
lesson that Resident Evil 5 learned the hard way. e

THE UNTOUCHABLES

FALLEN ANGEL

Game Halo: Combat Evolved Developer Bungie Format 360, PC, Mac, Xbox Original release 2001

As veterans of GoldenEye 007, David Doak and his
colleagues at Free Radical were among the few credible
active makers of console FPS games when they first heard,
via none other than former Edge editor Joao Diniz Sanches,
that Halo was pretty good. This, in the context of all the
hype, meant that it was terrific. Masterful, even.

“We were obviously very busy, but it was one of the few
games I actually took the time to play back then,” says
Doak. “And I spent whatever it was, a Saturday and a
Sunday, to play through it in a way you don’t often do —
and I really enjoyed it. But it’s a mixed bag...”

He is the first to admit that the TimeSplitters franchise
owes a few things to Halo: “TimeSplitters 3 had the whole
Flood thing going on, and we stole the weapon-overheating
thing and the way the plasma grenade
particle effect works.” So Doak knows “THE
Halo’s core loop is strong, and credits
its roots as a Mac realtime strategy
game for its non-player-centric
action, its Al and its openness, the
latter of which feels fresh to this day.

“One of the things that’s really
interesting in Halo, compared to
what’s happened since, is that what
you see going on is generally what’s
going on. There’s not much smoke
and mirrors: some ridiculous
cutscene’s playing just over there,
which looks amazing, but you
absolutely mustn’t go over and have a look. Some of my
strongest memories of playing Halo were being outside,
running about, where I'd been on the vehicles and stuff.”

And the weakest part of the experience? “The
presentation was good at promising a lot; the whole attract
sequence, with the choir and the ring world, is gorgeous.
But I could never buy into the fiction of Halo. You're
playing that opening mission, that insertion where you
drop down onto this ring, and you're thinking, ‘Fuck! This
story’s going places. Then the badass aliens are flying
around in their ships and it all feels really naughty and fun.
And then these little funny guys start doing slapstick, and
it’s kind of, “OK, ГЇЇ run with it! But the more I paed. ot
Halo in terms of thé pi га i id tt
characters and stuff... T

BUT I

was quite tongue-in-cheek, but it was really important for
[Microsoft] to have this shooter that appealed to their core
market, which is teenagers and 20-something lads. I don't
think those two things ever sat together really well.

“I could never really work out what was going on while I
was playing, my narrative motivation. Am I a robot or just
some big guy? I'm doing the classic sci-fi thing of everyone
going, 'Oh my God, there's this great secret that's going to
change everything. Then [the game] reveals them and
they're not terribly interesting. It seems to make that
mistake of the thing you’re doing being so important that
there's no lull in the pacing. The minute you do something
that's going to change the outcome of the war, someone
appears in a cutscene and goes, ‘No, no, no — now we've got

to do this. It's just relentless.”

ATTRACT
SEQUENCE,
WITH THE
CHOIR AND “Of course it doesn’t explain

RING WORLD,

IS GORGEOUS.

COULD
NEVER BUY

INTO HALO’S
FICTION”

Doak balks at the degree to which
fanboys have turned such vacuous
hokum into a sprawling mythology.

everything, they'll say. ‘You've got to
read the book. Well, I'm sure there are
better books to read.”

What really annoys Doak as a
professional developer, though, is the
first game's later level design. "It's the
Library [level], isn't it? That horrible
fucking endless cut-and-paste. ‘Now
I get to do the same thing over there!
The opening part of the game, in terms of pacing and stuff,
is just really sexy and engaging: ‘I’m not sure how the
combat mechanics work, but I’m in a shooter. Shit, there’s
someone flying at me! Га better hide. I can use the vehicles
as well? Ooh’ Then it gets to this part where you're
endlessly on foot with the same bloody attack patterns
coming at you again and again. And those annoying things
that shoot you with lasers. That's Halo's biggest crime:
‘That was really good. Did you like that? Well, you get to
do it again now. And again!

"It's funny, because that wouldn't happen now. People
would look at the drama and entertainment and noveny a
levels in a game, and someone would say, ‘Look,

| ppt this is just cut-and- -paste crap here. Just nis

vorried about the game

David Doak,
freelance game
consultant

taking ten hours to play through. It’s just padding.
Or something someone had done that no one had the heart

to tell them to take out.”

Doak’s more than happy to laud the art style, though,
even if it’s not perfect: “A lot of the things that look gaudy
about the flak and particles and stuff are actually very well
cued game signals when you're playing. There's a lot of
tracer stuff going around that's all colour-coded nicely, so
it helps you unpick what's going on and makes more
confusing situations readable. But there's a lot of what we
used to call ‘programmer pink; when a programmer makes
up a colour for something with some obvious hex value."

And while generally praising Halo's multiplayer
component, Doak admits that when he finally did get a
chance to play it he was too far behind the competition to
be hooked. The floatv vehicle handling is also singled out
for particular criticism. "I suspect the reasons are all to do
with physics performance, he notes. "It's a costly part
of the runtime, so having everything a bit slower makes
it easier. You get fewer collisions and stuff. That's why
it's like that, I'm sure.”

He struggles with the inventory system, too, which is to
suggest that the svstem struggles to properly accommodate
its players. "I bet you the fanboys can do it with their eyes
shut, but I've found that any attempt to manage your
inventory in a firefight ends badly. You'd be hacking away
at something and some guy drops a cool gun, but you know
that if you go over there vou'll spend ten seconds, which
feels like an hour, jigging around."

Many of these issues have been dealt with, or at least
improved, throughout the series, but others have not. Story
tends to be the sticking point, and Doak's most damning
remark is the one that rings truest: *I played Reach and just
couldn't remember if I'd finished the third one. There was
some big boss battle with a spidery thing that vou climbed
on... I can't remember any of the rest of it.

"What they did was start to erode the thing that was
interesting about the first one, which is that vou're the
über-soldier. They diluted the pool... When Bungie bought
themselves back out of Microsoft, people were going, 'But
they'll never get to make another Halo!’ And vou think,
"Yeah, and thank Christ for that! Surely they were fed up of
making it. They must have been.” e

THE UNTOUCHABLES) OVO,

THE EVIL WITHIN

Game Resident Evil 4 Developer Capcom Format 360, GameCube, PC, PS2, P53, Wii Original release 2005

We've looked at games that triumph and endure in
spite of their circumstances, but what about those that live
because of them? Games that let technology and tradition
give them shape and focus, hiding whatever flaws can't be
turned into groundbreaking, precision-engineered features.
There can be few greater examples than Resident Evil 4, a
game so indebted to the foibles of GameCube and survival
horror that it wouldn't exist without them. Not, at least, in
the form that defined a generation of action games.

Troubleshooting such a masterpiece is like trying to
defuse a tamper-proof bomb: who can say what problems
will cascade through the system when vou make the
slightest change? It's a very real challenge, too, when you're
one of the numerous developers charged with making a
Resident Evil 4 clone. Climax isn't one
of them, but it certainly knows their
handiwork. Prior to making Silent Hill:
Shattered Memories, it had to rescue
PSP's Silent Hill: Origins from the
efforts of another studio.

"Their template had been: let's
copy Resident Evil 4, but in the Silent
Hill world,” recalls design director
Rhys Cadle. *So some of the things
that didn't work 100 per cent in
Resident Evil 4, like that control
scheme, with the offset character and
the tank controls, is great in open
spaces, but if you put it in a corridor
then it's not so good. Transposing those controls into more
domestic interiors and doorways was not a fun thing to
play through. The emphasis on QTEs and combat and boss
fights and set-pieces didn't gel. The game had car chases
and other huge set-pieces that felt wrong. So when we did
Origins, our response to that was to say, partly due to lack
of time and money: ‘Why are we doing this? No one's ever
made a Silent Hill game on a PSP properly, so let's just do
that and do it well’

Cadle played though Resident Evil 4 “in a very small
number of sessions over an intense weekend; I actually had
to take breaks because I found it so intense. Not in the
scary sense necessarily, but because it was so relentless
how the gameplay worked. And I kept being amazed at how
bloody long the thing was. It was slightly daunting as a

AND

"YOU GET TO
THE END AND
YOU STILL SEE
THE SAME
CHARACTERS
FLYING OFF IN
HELICOPTERS,
TALKING
ABOUT SECRET
PROJECTS"

developer, going: 'I've just played 25 hours and it's never
really repeated itself, and it's just non-stop. They didn't
really take their foot off the gas for more than 30 seconds.”

Famously prototyped over several years, Resident
Evil 4 promised reinvention and subsequently transformed
a series apparently in its death throes. But not entirely, as
Cadle explains: “The lustre did come off a little bit, because
a big part of their spiel was that, 'We're getting rid of
zombies and the Umbrella Corporation, yet two-thirds of
the way in you find the hidden underground base and those
same old sequences: ‘Oh, there's been some strange
experiments going on. Even with awesome stuff like the
Regenerators [monsters whose weak spots are given away
by a heat-sensing sniper scope].

"There's definitely something
about them not necessarily having the
conviction to turn over a new leaf.
Because you get to the end of the
game and you stil see the same
characters flying off in helicopters,
talking about secret test projects and
what have you. It wasn't about
Umbrella as a technicality, but the
original premise was being dumped in
this quasi-Spanish village, and the
randomness of hunting for the
President's daughter. It had this weird
B-movie vibe, but then, like the first
season of 24, it slowly peeled back to this creepy little kid
you thought was the big baddie, and then all the people
with chainguns and rocket launchers."

None of this is necessarily bad, he admits. Yes, an
explicit part of the Shattered Memories design doc was: 'No
bosses, just set-pieces, but that was mainly due to the fact
that “the Silent Hill combat system is at odds with a
monster with lots of hitpoints running around" Indeed, the
Resident Evil series will likely never be as good again. Not
least because the original version of the game was
presented in a grungy standard definition perfectly
matched to its torches-and-pitchforks conceit — itself
instrumental in giving the scripted AI a feral cunning. But
by mixing the old and new to create this *ultimate' Resident
Evil, flaws must surely exist at the genetic level? e

“Well, you’re in that tricky scenario a lot of the classic
Japanese games are in. The game evolved along a certain
path, and the original was very much of the Alone In The
Dark model. A lot of the contrivances made sense in that
Lovecraftian setting, like the fact that all the story’s told
through diary pages. You've got all those mechanics that
are so integral to the experience that if you start tinkering,
it all falls apart. Resident Evil's always been happy to put its
hand up and say it’s a B-movie and that it’s going to have
corny dialogue, but I don’t know how much of that was one
of those weird things that evolved with the franchise,
because a lot of it came out of the mistranslations.”

The core of the Resident Evil 4 experience is also
brutally simple: “The defining ingredient is the minigame
shooting gallery, which crystallises
the fact that the entire game is a
shooting gallery: your character’s
generally stuck to the spot; some of
the zombies move faster, and they
have different heights they can walk
on; there are destructible scenery
elements and nice shiny trinkets you
can shoot; and you've got a bunch of
moving targets with different
priorities. It’s a shooting gallery on
wheels, and there are a hundred
different ways to dress that up.”

Is that a bad thing, though? On the
contrary, Cadle says, "it's really, really fun” It's also
somewhat ironic that between Resident Evil 4 and Killer 7,
another Capcom shooting gallery, it's the latter that's more
technically a survival horror, staying loyal to the tropes of
maps, keys and constant retreading. In fact, Cadle disputes
that Resident Evil 4 is a horror game at all: *It's an action
game. It's intense, it's disturbing, but it's not horror. People
get, if they're going into a horror game, that there might be
periods when it's not fun."

This, he explains, is why Resident Evil is "the healthier
of the so-called survival horror masters, Silent Hill being a
more left-field endeavour constantly conflicted over what
it should be. Silent Hill is a true analogue for cheap, niche
horror movies, which are — in a cruel twist — enormously
expensive to emulate in videogames. Resident Evil 4, on the

"RESIDENT
EVIL'S ALWAYS
BEEN HAPPY
TO PUT
HAND UP AND
SAY IT'S A
B-MOVIE AND
IT'S GOING TO
HAVE CORNY
DIALOGUE"

Rhys Cadle, design
director, Climax

other hand, is a wildly populist blockbuster that, with its
ability to spin carnival gameplay into epic adventure, might
just be the most villainous game in our entire line-up.
“I think what you've just made us prove is that although
Resident Evil 4 doesn't really have any faults, all of its faults
were what it brought into the world," chuckles Cadle. "A lot
of the criticism you can level at it is what other people did
with the template, because it took the QTEs to a level that
just about worked for that game. And after that, everyone
else said, “Well, if they can do it, we can!

"The number of people I've spoken to in movies who
say that when Star Wars came out it completely ruined the
business of making movies... Prior to that it was something
grown-ups did. You think of the golden age of movies in
the '70s, and then the minute Star
Wars came out — and people realised
you could merchandise this stuff to
kids — that fundamentally changed
the logistics. It changed everything.

“If vou look at the games that have
been successes, the kinds of games
publishers are asking for after Resident
Evil 4, it's very much defined by that
blockbuster approach. Not just the
content, but the amount of content
people expect, and being able to focus
on a core set of mechanics but roll
that through a whole load of scenarios.
It's hard to argue with it, because you
play through Resident Evil 4 and you're like, "Wow!"

"But I remember when Edge did their recent 100 games
list and it was really near the top, and I had to be honest
with myself and say that when I played that game it was a
10/10 experience. But actually I look back at the
experiences in games that I cherish and Resident Evil 4
didn't really have those. If it had been a movie, it would
have been the kind of thing Га see on a wet Saturday
afternoon, laughing at its bad jokes and explosions. It's one
of those sad things when people ask if games are competing
on a level footing with movies. It's exciting, and the level
of craftsmanship is incredible, and it enabled other
developers to do things that are slightly deeper, but it's still

illi Ы. er about а guy rescuing a Eresi

ITS

THE UNTOUCHABLES

WORLDS

APART?

Game Super Mario Galaxy Developer Nintendo EAD Tokyo Format Wii Original release 2007

When someone takes a shot at Nintendo’s mighty
mascot, they seldom aim to wound. He may walk and talk
like a mustachioed toddler, but don't be fooled: Mario
comes protected by Metacritic-toughened armour and the
most zealous bodyguards in gaming. His ego takes nothing
short of a meteor strike to bruise.

That's what Internet celebrity Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw
must have thought when firing two very similar salvos at
Super Mario Galaxy and its sequel. ‘Stagnation’ was the
watchword of the second, closely followed by a breathless
stream of fan-baiting blows. His is not a viewpoint shared
by our two volunteers here, though: Dino Patti, CEO of
Limbo creator Playdead, and veteran BioShock level designer
Steve Gaynor, who is now freelancing.

Patti begins: “For what it wants to
do, Super Mario Galaxy is perfect. It’s
just super-hardcore in doing core
gameplay. You can’t do the puzzles by
half: you either do them or don't. It's
maybe not the best game in the world
— И doesn't really have a moody or
intriguing story — but [Nintendo]
know what they want.

“It’s kind of become a joke: how
are they going to kidnap the Princess
this time? But what you always want
in a game is a sense of purpose, no
matter what you do. Nintendo just
wants to deepen this. It wants flat
characters — characters without flaws. It would be really
cool if they did have one instalment that actually had a
twist: you find the Princess halfway through and then do
something unexpected. That would be great, but it'd be
worse if they tried and didn’t fulfil it.”

“As a level designer,” says Gaynor, “I felt really kind of
inspired — or maybe, in a way, jealous at the time — of the
core tenets of their level design, with the crazy abstract
spheroid playspaces, and the arbitrary gravity. It was a
really cool, interesting, original idea that supported classic
platformer gameplay in a new way, but also they took full
advantage of the core premise, and kept pushing the
possibilities further and further. The central ideas really
gave the designers a ton of freedom, and they didn’t take
that for granted, which was awesome to see.”

“THERE’S THAT
KIND OF
BORING AND
POINTLESS
INTRO LEVEL,
AND THEN
YOU’RE
HAVING TO
GO BACK TO
THE HUB”

Our pair agree that despite the presence of Nintendo’s
latest invention, the Wii Remote, the game doesn’t feel as
revolutionary as Super Mario 64. But that isn’t a problem.
“The motion controls were more of an optional feature or a
support feature,” says Gaynor. “You could use them to shoot
star bits at enemies and stun them to optimise your
performance, but they didn’t get in the way or feel
gimmicky, which is a trap that so many Wii games fall into.
It felt like the best use of the system thus far, partly
because of how little it relied on the [motion] features.

"It's interesting that a flagship Wii game didn't really
use the Wii motion functionality much. But, honestly,
I think that's for the best, and shows a lot of really good,
smart restraint on the part of the designers, because they
recognised that they were strictly
making a platform game, and that
motion didn't have a ton of relevance
to that design, so they didn’t
shoehorn it in. The fact that they
shipped the motion controls they did
probably means it was the best
implementation there could've been
for that project, which is great, and
I'm really glad they apparently weren't
under enough external pressure to
just cram unnecessary gimmick
motion features into the game that
most likely would've made it worse."

Patti echoes those sentiments:
"It's called Galaxy, and that's a cool theme, and they got the
best out of that theme. Nintendo knows the essence of
gameplay, whereas the big military shooters wouldn't know
gameplay if it bit them in the ass.”

For all its successes, though, there are some flaws. Its
intro — awkwardly blending tutorial and cutscene, with a
glaze of unskippable text — shows that Super Mario Galaxy
might have a knowing disregard for story, but it's hardly
100 per cent game. "With a lot of Nintendo's core
properties, it seems to be more and more of a problem: how
much text you have to advance through to get to the game,”
says Gaynor. "There's that kind of boring and pointless

ойр back to 1 С |

Dino Patti, chief

Steve Gaynor,
executive officer freelance writer and
of Playdead videogame designer

text while tutorial mechanics are still being introduced.
And then there's the storybook stuff! The critical path
story never seems to really add to the experience. So, yeah,
I don't know — I'm not sure where the desire for more
story by volume in Nintendo games comes from.

“It’s possible it's some idea of expanding to a wider,
more casual audience or something like that, especially
with the identity of the Wii at the time. But in my
experience, both hardcore and casual players equally want
to get to the core experience as quickly and painlessly as
possible, which in Mario is the play.”

Patti thinks that idea of a broader Nintendo audience
might explain the game’s repetitive boss battles, too. “You
can get stuck in Limbo, because we're targeting adults, but
Nintendo want kids of maybe six and seven to play, all the
way up to our age. These small iterations on the same boss
— each one a little harder, maybe with a new trick — are a
teaching method. The game’s designed to take as many
gamers through it as possible.”

Perhaps it’s inevitable, then, that there's a certain
degree of conflict — the hardcore vs the casuals, old vs new.
Gaynor sees the symptoms in its frequent returns to
mechanics better left in the games that made them famous:
“Like levels that were basically just single-gravity-direction
Super Mario 64 levels, or the ones where you were racing a
stingray or whatever. Because something that was really
good about the spheroid levels, aside from just being new
and different, was that they were generally very forgiving,
because gravity always pulled you back to a surface, so you
couldn’t just fall off the edge and die.

“In the more traditional platforming levels, or the race
levels, you could kind of suddenly fail with this binary
failstate, where you fell into the void or lost the race. You
lost progress, and it could be frustrating. They also had the
really hard challenge levels, which you never had to play
if you didn’t want to, and that kind of put them in a
different category. But the other stuff you were required to
deal with to progress, which rubbed its old-schoolness in
your face. So the fact that they held on to some of the
older-school styles of level, maybe just thinking that the
audience would demand them if they weren't there, was
probably the biggest blemish оп. an. experience that
otherwise felt very new and engaging" №

silicon

Atter emerging from the fertile soil that was Acorn
Computing т the 1980$, the Cambridge-based
ARM has fought its way into the upper echelons of
the semiconductor industry armed with just one simple
business tactic: creating low-power, high-spec
designs and licensing them to a range of partners. Its
success has seen its technology placed at the heart
of modern gaming, with ARM-designed architecture
in 95 per cent of all smartphones sold, as well as
Nintendo's 305 and Sony's PlayStation Vita
hardware. Now the company is taking on the likes of
Imagination Technologies in the high-end graphics
processing sector with its advanced Mali-T600 range
of GPUs, based on the Midgard architecture. It's also
keeping one eye on the exploding tablet market and,
of course, future generations of gaming hardware.
We talk to Paul Newby Ё

E, Marcus Melroy

and Ben James KX to discover more about ARM's
approach, how its recruiting a new generation ої
talent, and where it sees its research — and the wider

videogame industry — going in the coming years. ©

storemags

SILICON SCIENCE

Sno
гаш GPU

BITES

дї аа E
рЕГЕ ОГ а ГС Е
it's а totally
ОІРРЕГЕПТ
paradigm То
an ^oox Bo,"

From left: Paul Newby
(software engineering
manager), Marcus
McElroy (hardware
engineering manager)
and Ben James (SGL
& staff engineer) at
ARM's Cambridge,
UK, headquarters

work with OEMs to make sure we're
aware of exactly how things are
going to be used. We have internal
research that looks into the future —
the next big thing that will be used to
exercise the GPU, for example.
There's а lot of buzz at the moment
around GPU computing — using

then spend their money creating
tasty dishes from those recipes, and
spinning them in a different way

to create а niche for themselves.
Paul Newby We're innovating in
this space, coming up wilh different
architectures for the future, removing
the need for other companies to do

the same. And the royalty-based
business model that's used is far
better for [our clients] than investing
heavily in their own R&D. That
business model is a crucial part of

the GPU as а general-purpose
computing device, so thats OpenCL
if you're looking at it from a Khronos

API point of view, or Google
Renderscript more recently if you're

owadays, ARM is recognised as a where we are today. coming from an Android point of
strong player in mobile computing, view, 1'5 going to be interesting to
but how did you get to this point? see how that tokes off.

Marcus McElroy VVe're known in the

industry for classleading, energy-
efficient CPUs, so we have a foot in
the door, and we have a lot of

What are the specific benefits we'll
see in gaming?
PN Well, there are a number of

CAREER
FOCUS

| After studying
knowledge about how to build high- things that have typically run on the dass onal
end processors. We've used the CPU — but you can now utilise the s se eg
experience we've gained building highly parallel environmen! of the д Of York. Ben
CPUs and applied that to what are GPU to accelerate that content. James joined ARM five
now becoming successful GPUs, Physics engines, games engines — nie
which are being deployed into a they could make full use of an software group on а
vas! array of devices. extensive GPU parallel computing a arg
device. Depending on Ihe use case, moved into hardware
But the market for low-power, significantly higher performance verification, where
ultra-efficient chips must have can be achieved harnessing the —€— a
' кате rigorously tested, and
been obvious since the rise of computational power of the GPU. is now verifying the
mobile phones in the ‘90s — why MM ve call it ‘visual computing’. еду рон s
didn't you come up against GPUs are moving from what were because I'm a pedant,
| tHon? "n x i and that's a skill you
more competition? m traditionally 2D and 3D graphics ا‎ чын ү
ММ | think [other companies] did accelerators lo devices that are he says. “You have to
realise, but the unique thing about extremely powerful for stream be very exacting and
ARM is th hte hue Е d ree able to badger people
ARM is the partnership business processing and general-purpose to get things how
model, So whereas others have been | computation. You can use that they should be."
focused on what they've historically To clarify, you don’t manufacture power fo accelerate physics, you ДЕСЕЎ
done well by themselves, we have parts within the company, right? can use it for emerging interface tasks involved?
taken input from, and worked very ММ Wie do a small amount of technologies such as face and | hnic is testing
closely with, a wide base of manufacturing — as part of the speech recognition, you can use il the requirements,"
customers — we've produced ideas verification of our hardware and for highrdynamic range processing "— зе Lon
and come up with solutions to their semiconductor IP designs, we and filtering effects on your camera... anda model which
problems. It costs a lot of money to produce silicon prototypes. lts law All those things that were traditionally implements the
develop the sort of stuff we develop, volume, but an extremely important done through the CPU or a dedicated e hy
and actually, in the current climate, part of our validation process. DSP on the device. Verification is about
companies are looking more and PN It's highly parallel, its about алма mete
| : S M model and the final
more toward outsourcing and What are the new uses emerging performing the same sort of operation design are functionally
consolidation. ARM is delivering to for your technology? on a number of pixels, so image — it's 8
our customers not just the ingredients, PN We get different use cases from processing will be a big deal. It'll viser be +» x
but also the recipe book on how to dillerent customers — our interface be interesting to see how many does happen. ——
generale really high-performance, wilh Ihem is very much at Ihe companies really start utilising that —— —X

low-power devices. Our customers

graphics API level, so we also

over the next year. We support it ©

see if it still works."

si@vemads.com

all, obviously; we have to prepare
for the next wave of devices.

Your Mali-T604 will be
starting to appear in devices this
year. What can you tell us about it,
specifically its capabilities?

MM The key things about the Mali-
T600 series is its high performance
and ability to support a wide range
of graphics and compute APIs. The
Mali-200 and Mali-400 MP devices
are traditional 2D//3D graphics
technologies. The new stuff in the
Mali-T600 series of GPUs is focused
on emerging graphics technologies
such as the next generation of the
Khronos OpenGL ES API. But we've
also added computational resources
and a huge amount of software to
facilitate customers wanting to use our
GPUs for general-purpose computing
through fullorofile OpenCL and
Renderscript computing,

PN We're looking at the Windows
side of things as well — we'll be
supporting the next wave of DirectX,
for example.

Qualcomm claims that its next
GPU, within Snapdragon 54, is
comparable to an Xbox 360. Is

it possible to compare the hardware
you're designing at ARM with the
performance of current consoles?
ММ It's difficult to say, because we
have such a scoleable architecture;
we con configure our GPUs from a
very small number of processing
elements to a very large number,
and your perlormance envelope is
therefore very wide. But, yes, we're
definitely in the same ballpark, and
in some configurations beyond what
you'd see in a console today.

PN And you're not really comparing
apples to apples here, We're not
about raw GPU 3D graphics
performance; we're all about low-
power graphics performance — that's
getting the job done in the leas!
amount of power. Is a completely
different paradigm to something like
an Xbox 360.

к= at arm

You have over 2,100 people
working at ARM now — what sort
of projects are they involved in?
ММ On the hardware side, it's a

real spectrum. At one end, it's
research and development and
analysis of nexkgeneration designs,
which ultimately feeds ideas into
mainstream engineering. A lot of
engineers there are working at the
micro-architecture level, so they're
taking these high level ideas and
Ihey're assessing whether they can be
built into hardware constructs. It they
can, those designs get committed
and, once specified and coded, they

"[nere'ea
SENSE OF pride
In Seeing Your
Ideas Gong

all Tne way
thrauan That
product cnaim
and cropping
OUT IN a DEVICE
Years later”

are extensively verified by Ben and
his team lo ensure they're meeting
the criteria and are functionally
robust. Ultimately, when the things
are plugged together they must
operate at a high performance

and be seamless from оп integration
point of view.

What are the most rewarding
aspects of the job?

Ben James It's working with incredibly
intelligent people, learning every

day and dealing wilh challenging
problems that are interesting to solve.
There's о real sense of achievement

in fixing a problem that's been

really awkward to go through.

MM | think all the engineers get a
huge amount of pleasure from seeing
something they've hand crafted and
worked on for years appearing т a
device. There's a sense of price in
seeing your ideas going all the way
through that product chain and
dropping out in a device years later.

It seems that ARM has a very

thin management layer, perhaps
because the company was
established and is still largely

run by engineers. Is that an
accurate appraisal?

BJ We've got quite a smal-company
elhos. You effectively only have two
managers: a line manager, who is
your traditional project manager, and
then you have a technical lead –
although they're really working on the
same level as you most of the time.
It's not a case of being dictated to;
there's a lot of freedom in what you
can do, and there is a lot of respect
between Ihe engineers. Generally,
discussions around a specific
technical leature won't be eschewed
by someone because they're more
technical or higher up the command
chain. Is all very open.

Is the company generally open

to ideas that come from junior
members of the engineering team?
PN When anybody joins, after

a certain period of time we'll ask

for their input and any areas they
can see for improvement, based

on what they've done so far. To be
honest, a huge part of what we

do is driven by Ihe engineering
community. lts a highly collaborative
environment at all levels,

MM We also allow the engineers

lo take time out Гот their day jobs.
It's very easy to get stuck into focusing
on deadline-driven projects, but we
have processes in place to allow
people, as best we can, to take time
out to innovate. Once a quarter,

we have these innovation days,
where the entire engineering

community downs tools; it's an open
day, you do what you want, but the
idea is you use the time to come up
with novel blue-sky solutions to
everyday problems that people are
encountering on projects, or on
general areas that you think will be
beneficial tor ARM. Innovation is at
the heart of what we do, and we try
hard to foster that, because the
success of our business is based on it,

come out of innovation days?

BJ Well, it's hard to bluesky a new
processor in a day! It tends to be
more micrcrarchitectural changes,
[things like] an optimisation here or
Ihere. Small ideas like that, which
build up to a product, rather than:
'Неге the next Cortex core.’

PN And innovation days can be
about the way that we do things,
rather than the product itself.

MM One example | can think of is
a texture-compression format which
ARM has just proposed. It's called
ASTC - adaptive scaleable texture
compression — and it's precisely what
il says: a novel texture compression
format that we've put some fairly
extensive engineering effort into.

What are the specific benefits of
the ASTC format?

BJ Better compression, higher
signaHo-noise ratio, lower gate
count... Is pretty much across the
field better than other alternatives.

So if someone were to join the
media processing division of

MM They'd be working around
future methods of improving visual
computing, which covers the
traditional graphics APis — OpenGL,
OpenCL, OpenVG, DirectX – bul,
as we mentioned, more recently
it's Я Е for

torémiads c

general and at the evolution of
GPGPU computing.

company still have a certain
amount of direct input into the
engineering process?

ММ I'm much less hands-on than |
used to Бе. A day for me is really
about ensuring that the engineering
tleom are doing the right thing, that
the needs of the customers and
stakeholders have been understood,

that the plans we have in place to

deliver а product are robust, and

that the resources being applied to
the project are sufficient, IF not, I'll

be looking at ways to establish
additional resources through growing
engineering talent or recruiting new
people. There's innovation to be
made in how we run and track
projects, and we have to get quite
lowlevel at some points to understand
an orgument that the team might be
putting forward that we may need

to conclude.

BJ That's another great thing about
clically all of the managers
t engineering

background, so the whole team
works better as a result. You don't feel
like you're talking lo a manager, you
feel like you're talking to a fellow
engineer who you can discuss
technical problems with.

In which areas are you looking to
recruit new staff at the moment?
PN Vve have a large software

tleom spanning ARM's Cambridge,
Trondheim, Lund and Shanghai
design centres, We have vacancies
ranging from graduate level through
to industry guru level. We need
embedded software engineers,
preferably with C programming
experience and exposure to Khronos
APIs such as OpenGL ES, OpenVG,
OpenCL and ЕСІ. We're looking for
people with experience in embedded
software driver development, perhaps
with graphics experience, but that's
not essential, One area we need
people is in integration with various
windowing systems, so EGL from a
Khronos point of view. But generally
embedded software developers who
have а good knowledge of SOCs,
ММО, who understand how all that
hangs together, and who understand
the resource-constrained environmen!
so they're able to make good
judgement calls from а software point
of view, We're recruiting heavily in
that area at the moment. So, in
summary, driver development,
graphic experience and windowing
system integration experience.

We also need software
architects with experience in GPU
device drivers and Khronos graphics
APIs engineers with experience in
content validation, performance
benchmarking and optimisation of
graphics SVV stacks and hardware.

Where are you finding people

to fill these sorts of positions?

PN If we can see a way in which

we can actually take more general
software development experience

in the embedded sector, we will
consider those people. In terms of @

SILICON SCIENCE

sofware architecture, it's a layered
architecture and there are areas of
it that will lend themselves to more
generic embedded soltware
developers. We'd consider people

without graphics experience for those

roles, so we can tap into other parts
of the industry — whatever type of
embedded development.

We continue to look for the best
graphics people. People with good
experience of windowing system
integration, Android experience,
DirectX experience — those sorts of
people are who we're really looking
for at the moment.

How about on the hardware side?
MM Generally, its people from a
relevant industry background, but it
doesn't necessarily have lo be 3D
graphics exclusively — people who
have a more generic computer
science CPU/'video processor

type of background are all the sort
of applicants we'd consider.

We're interested in talking to
people who have hardware design
or verification experience and are
motivated by the same things we
are — producing really cool
technology. Specifically, we're
looking lor engineers who are
experienced in GPU architecture
and/or micro-architecture, engineers
who have project experience in
designing complex hardware using
a hardware description language
like Verilog or VHDL, and engineers
who have project experience in
verifying complex hardware using
a hardware verification language
like SystemVerilog.

We also take graduates,
typically people who have studied
computer architecture, electronic
engineering, computer systems. But
equally, there are people in the
industry — bedroom hackers, people
who have a passionate interest in
and understanding of 3D graphics
technology — who we wouldn't rule
out if they. want pursue а career

| @ ортеп.

Do you take graduates on the
software side as well?

PN Yes, and we find that we can
grow them into what we need as a
business. A lot of the people we bring
in stay with ARM for years — our level
of retention is really good. In terms of
bringing in people with more generic
skills, what we're looking for from a
generic software engineer is the
maturity of that individual, their
experience and skills in general
sofware development, If they tell us
they pick up new things really quickly,
great. Is about getting the best
people. One thing I'd have to say
about ARM is that the people are
technically brilliant. It’s all about hiring

"Ine process
guys always
say, Next
year IT won t
Work, eut
researcners
Keep managing
та pull some
Trick our oF
TNE Dag”

the best people. IF that means hiring
the best generic software developer
who you then have to train up in
graphics, that's fine.

|5 there a lot of training, or are
newcomers usually moved straight
onto live projects?

PN Its a litle bit of everything. Like
any company, we have a standard set
of training programmes. Other than
that, there are things that are based
on your personal development, on
chats with your manager, on how you
want to evolve your career. A lot of it
is on Ihe job, with mentoring and
coaching from others.

MM | would say [that they go] in ai
the deep end! That's how ARM tends
to work. From day one, people are
given challenging technical tasks to
work оп, That might be in conjunction
with a more senior designer, but we
expect them to be contributing from
the beginning. We will support their
development by gradually opening
them up to more challenging and
demanding roles within а project.

PN Being fung in at the deep end
isn't a bad thing, You tend to find the
soris of applicants we attract are those
who want to work with technically
brilliant people... | mean, learning is

a big carrot lor technical engineers!

And what about progression?

PN ARM is one of the very few
companies that has a clear distinction
between ils management path and
technical path — and you're not limited
either way. In a lot of companies,
you'll get so far on the technical

side, and will then have to flip to
management in order to progress.
That does not happen at ARM. We
take persona! development very
seriously here, And there are no limits
to how quickly you can progress.

| think this is all fairly unusual,

BJ It's also worth noting that graduates
are on an accelerated programme, so
they're reviewed and assessed twice
as often as more established
engineers, because they're expected
to be ramping up quite quickly —
they're given a chance to really shine.
PN And people identified as high
achievers are marked as such and
they're closely managed to ensure that
they get the attention they need.

Do you think game coders would
MM Yes, we need developers who
feel that they could write killer shaders
to stress test our designs. It would help
if they knew a bit about — or were
interested in learning — how GPU data
paths work. We also want developers
who feel that they could write stunning
demos to showcase our technology.

Poller Lipo

Obviously, with each iteration of
ARM's CPUs and GPUs you're
getting more processing power with
more efficiency, but will there soon
come a point at which you can't
iterate any further along your
current architectural lines?

MM Graphics, by its nature, is
incredibly parallelised, so
theoretically you could have one
computation element working on
one pixel in parallel with thousands
ol others, but in practice you can’!
build that = the thermal effects, the
packaging costs and the software
complexity are enormous. Sa, yes,
there is an artificial wall, but that wall
continually moves. New process
technologies are rolled out, you can
push the envelope in terms of energy
density... At some point, I'm sure
we'll have to look at alternative
architectures, and that's what we're
doing as part of our ongoing R&D;
we're innovating in other ways of
doing the same thing at a lower cost
and with a lower energy footprint.

But in terms of processing
are there any plateaus on the
horizon where the industry may
have to change its approach to

CPU and CPU design?

BJ VVell, the end of Moore's Law is
always just around the corner. The
process guys always say, "Next year
it won't work, so find something
new,” but researchers keep
managing to pull some trick out of the
bag to make it work. But now, if you
look at the numbers, we're getting to
gate thicknesses of a few atoms, so
the point at which it really won't work
any more isn't too far away, There
will be a revolution at some point, but
no one quile knows what it is and
when it will happen.

During our previous visit, we saw
the microcontroller lab, where your

$ “ ve

that could be used in all sorts of
appliances. Do you think we're
heading towards a future of
pervasive computing in which just
about everything has a CPU and

a Wi-Fi connection?

BJ | think it will be pervasive, but
also transparent. Where you can
have a light switch, you can have

a microprocessor, so there will be
one there al some point. II shouldn't
be in the way, it should silently make
things work better. That's my vision of
the future!

What do you think we can

expect from the next generation

of smartphones in terms of
gaming performance?

PN It comes down to how they're
going to use all the grunt we
provide on our GPUs. Again, | think
it's worth watching how GPUs are
going to be used as general-purpose
computing devices, and how they'll
take advantage of that extra
processing power. | think there will
be new killer user cases that can
take advantage of all this processing
power we provide. 15 about

people understanding the technology

that's in the device and making

use of it, because it's no longer just
a matter of 2D and 3D graphics
hardware acceleration.

MM | think you'll see a platform
that will have functionality allowing
developers to use GPUs for
nontraditional workloads, but the
rate of adoption tor that is anyone's
guess, We believe that, as we
provide this infrastructure, companies
will begin to see the benetits and
make use of them in everyday
applications. At the moment, there
are many ideas about how GP on
GPUs might be employed, but no
one is really going down that route
just yet. Over the course of this year,
people will start to deploy apps
based on the capabilities of our
GPU hardware.

When we spoke previously, ARM
was looking beyond portable

the traditional console space. [5
that still the case?

ММ It's а very active area that we're
keeping a close eye on.

РМ The technology and architecture
that we provide doesn't preclude us
trom being in that space. The
computational and graphics power
that we provide would be sufficient.
I's something we're watching.

Do you think console design is likely
to move more into your area, with
smaller, more portable machines?
How about tablet-based consoles?
PN Its interesting to watch = | can
certainly see the benefits of tablets.

Let's talk in terms of a time
frame; Whot do you think the
engineers here will be working
on in, say, five years’ time?
MM | think that we'll see
shader complexity increasing
significantly. At the moment,
[they're] complex, but there are
certain techniques that people
want to employ that will take
that to the next level, №

TABLET
TIMES

The consumer tech
market trending
toward tablets hasn't
gone unnoticed at
ARM. "They're
pervasive in the
market at the moment,
and that's all down
to low-power
computing,” Paul
Newby notes. "The
technology wouldn't
have been possible
five years ago."

Importantly, the
company sees tablets
becoming part of the
wider living room
entertainment space,
"As computing power
increases,” says Ben
James, “we're going
to see more tablets
driving larger displays
— perhaps instead of
standalone games
consoles doing the
same thing. It opens
up lots of possibilities.
Fundamentally, if you
can take your games
console or computing
device with you in
your bag, you can
plug it in anywhere -
you don't need a
standalone PC."

The 'second screen'
concept is, of course,
what's driving
Nintendo's Wii U
design. И may also be
in the design plans for
Microsoft's next Xbox.
Indeed, Xbox may well
point the way for
another change to
tablets that ARM
foresees, "I'm also
expecting more
physical interaction
with the devices," says
Newby. “So less based
around finger controls
and more tracking
body movements and
gestures." Marcus
McElroy picks up
the theme: "We've
seen the human
interface improving
over the last few
years with multitouch
interfaces, but
interaction through
devices needs to
be evolved."

5o does ARM see
the possibility of a
tablet console with a
built-in Kinect-like
device? "Anything is
possible," says James.

STILL
PLAYING

Super Crate Box #5
Infuriating, impossible and yet irresistible,
this sadistic little platformer takes systems
old and new (from the speedy singlescreen
platforming of the original Donkey Kong to
the eccentric cartoon look of Super Meat
Boy) and shoves them in a blender. The
result is an addictive hight to capture the
crates and, as is equally important in a
game idee one hit kills, stay alive

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days 360, PC, P53

It may not have the tightest cover shooter
mechanics, but that merely adds to the
sense of peril as the Chinese underworld
closes in on videogames’ two craziest
killers. The visual design makes the
experience — like Black Rain by way of
Michael Mann — as you run and yell your
way through bleak urban battlefields,

Metal Gear Solid HD Collection 340, 53
№ hard to believe it's been ten years
since Metal Gear Solid 2 turned fan
expectation on its head. It's harder still to
believe how well it holds up now, both as a
fusion of still-unrivalled cutscene mastery
and a meticulous stealth-action game.
Watching the series evolve across MGS2,
MGS3 and Peace Walker is fascinating,
and reveals that although Kojima may
borrow greedily from pop culture, his
videogame design remains truly original.

We test games using
Sony's LED full-HD 3D
Bravia display technology. For
details of the entire range,
visit www.bit.ly/xgni3d

REVIEWED
THIS ISSUE

102

106

110

114

116

118

120

122

123

124

REVIEVVS. INIERVIEVVS. PERSPECTIVES. AND SOME NUMBERS

www. bit. ly/it2QiG
Up-to-the-minute
reviews and previews

Final Fantasy XIII-2
360, PS3

Wipeout 2048
Vita

Star Wars: The Old Republic
PC

Uncharted: Golden Abyss

Vita

The Darkness Il
360, PC, РУЗ

Kin doms Of Amalur:

eckoning
e PC, P53 9

NeverDead
360, PS3

Metal Gear Solid 3D:
Snake Eater
305

Haunt

360

Little Deviants

Vita

Everybody’s Golf
Vita

Reality Fighters
Vita

Why Uncharted to go will
never beat Drake at home

For the second time now, Sony has built a portable gaming device around
the promise of console-quality gaming. It’s hard to argue with the results
on a technical level – you'll never have taken a handheld system on your
morning commute that’s capable of such astonishing visual sheen before.
And from a practical perspective, Vita’s twin analogue sticks (along with a
wealth of more novel control inputs) finally make experiences possible on a
portable device that until now have been confined to the home.

But is Uncharted: Golden Abyss (p114) = as solid an entry in the continuing
adventures of Nathan Drake as it might be — really what you want to be playing
before the start of a working day? You can forget about
holding a coffee in your free hand for a start, and must
instead get to grips with a sophisticated control scheme
while you're fighting for a seat. And even should you
accomplish this, Golden Abyss's dedication to the pacing
and structure of its forebears — long periods of exploration
and exposition, punctuated by action — make it quite
unsuited to being played in precious slivers of free time.

You'll have your own context in which you play Vita
games, of course, possibly one that's more tractable than
a jammed train carriage. It would be an indispensable
companion on long-haul flights, for instance, and obviously
it works as well on a sofa as any portable device. But if the
point of handheld gaming is convenience and flexibility,
then trying to cram an experience designed for consoles
onto a handheld seems to miss the point. Vita is a formidable
piece of tech, but shouldn't it be turned in the direction
of a new breed of portable game, rather than dragging
experiences built for the home into the harsh light of day?

10]

PLAY

Final Fantasy XIII-2

inal Fantasy ХПГ Active Time Battle (АТВ) system
was one expertly crafted change to the formula that
came alongside some less welcome others. Kev
among these was that the usual sidequest-packed open-
world structure had been replaced with a linear journey
that offered the bare minimum of distractions. The
reaction to FFXIII from fans and the press was mixed,
which brings us to FFXIII-2, the sequel that Square Enix
claims will give players what they wanted from the
previous game. But while FFXIII-2 is a polished
production that certainly diverges, unfortunately it's
also a baffling, boring and swampy thing to play.

It opens with a stunning cutscene in which
Lightning — FFXIIT's hero, who's now playing the role of
warrior goddess — does battle with a cackling evildoer.
The sequence in its entirety takes about 20 minutes
to play out, during which you're given limited control
for brief stretches. This is a sign of things to come: a
battle that is impossible to lose, a helping of QTEs, and
some terrifically dull monologues. But FFXIII-2's
opening is so visually astonishing, featuring a gigantic
city formed from crvstal, monstrous armies clashing,
and Lightning's dazzlingly choreographed advance
through it all, that it's impossible to look away.

After this prelude, Lightning's off and you're in
control of her sister, Serah, and accompanied by a time
traveller called Noel who resembles a Kingdom Hearts
B-lister. This is your party for the whole game, leading
to FEXIII-2's first change to the АТВ system: Pokémon.

The system is once again built around three party
members, each with certain roles that can be cycled
through with a ‘Paradigm Shift? With two slots used
here for Noel and Serah, the third is left open for
creatures. You acquire new beasts by defeating them,
and then they can be levelled up, assigned to your party
(up to three monsters can be in your battle team,
although only one can fight), or even fed to other
creatures in order to transfer desirable traits.

It's simpler than it first appears, but the system is
let down by the lack of space you have for combinations
of roles (called ‘paradigms’). Both Noel and Serah can
learn multiple classes, and alongside your trio of
monsters (each of which has a single speciality role)
the number of possibilities is huge, but you're always
limited to six paradigms in the actual battles. Among
the manv strengths of the ATB system is its flexibility
— which having multiple monsters in different roles
would seem to emphasise — but the feature's never
given enough breathing space.

That's arguably a matter of preference, but a much
wider problem is the game's lack of challenge. FFXIII-2
is the first game in the series with an adjustable
difficulty mode — a choice between Normal and Easy —
but even on Normal this is a very easy game indeed.
Common enemies are walkovers, and despite often

102

Publisher Square Enix
Developer In-house
Format 360, P53
Release Out now

Many of the
locations are
captivating,
but this is still
a poky world
full of invisible
walls and

fixed details

BIND MOGGLING

А new element in FFXIII-2's
random battles is the Moogle
Clock. When enemies spawn, a
circle appears around Serah and
begins counting down. During
this time, you can either whack
your foes to begin battle with a
first-move advantage, or try to
escape from the circle and avoid
fighting altogether. As you play
through FFXIII-2, its main use
becomes clear: skipping as
many fights as possible, because
monsters remain at their old
strength when you revisit earlier
areas. And you thought it
couldn't get any easier.

taking a good deal of punishment, bosses are rarely a
threat. The time investment required to complete
FFXIII-2 is huge, but our characters perished a mere
handful of times. As an experiment, we left Serah and
company to fend for themselves over the course of
ten battles, with no player input. With an idle plaver
character and two AI companions set up to attack and
heal, our party emerged victorious from everv fight.

The ATB system is still a fine achievement, and
most of FFXIII-2's tweaks are smart ones, but there's
just nothing worth fighting against. Only two bosses
required retries throughout our entire runthrough.
Meanwhile, the addition of QTEs, bringing a few
simplistic flourishes at the end of big battles, does
little to enhance vour sense of satisfaction.

Combat isn't the only area of FFXIII-2 where the
execution lags behind the concept. For instance, the
game's structure is built around the ‘Historia Crux} a
level-select screen that allows you to jump between
unlocked locations and alternate timelines at will. The
idea of time travelling through FFXIII's universe is a
great one, but certain areas have had a lot more energy
spent on them than others. On one occasion we visited
a new level, a cutscene plaved out, and that was it.

Many of the locations are entirely captivating,
however, and FFXIII-23 further demonstrates the talent
at work within Square Enix's art divisions. In terms of
construction, however, this is still a poky world full of
invisible walls and fixed details. The settings may have
a sense of scope and majesty, but as interactive
environments they get by with the bare minimum.

The lack of imagination in FFXIII-2's subquests,
which are a large part of its bulk, is what really drives
this home. What do time travellers do? Well, these
particular examples find lost watches, source old
computer batteries, shear sheep, and beat up monsters.
There's the odd detail that's more interesting —
bringing back messages from the dead, or creating the
right circumstances to fight something in the future —
but in general FFXIII-2 offers no more than cookie-
cutter fetch quests that waste its theme's potential.

This is a big game, clocking in at about the 40-hour
mark, but the lack of challenge in combat combined
with the formulaic missions and frequent cutscenes too
often make it feel like a sticky trudge. The visual and
audio design is marvellous at times, offering up the
kind of setting that vou drink in before taking a single
step, but the journey is always the same. The apparently
open structure disguises a simple closed network of
locked doors and narrow environments, while the ATB
system is wasted on enemies that would struggle to
defeat a corpse. Perhaps this is indeed the game Final
Fantasy nuts thought they wanted, but surely even Я
they'll be disappointed with the result.

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ABOVE Beating bigger nasties means building up their ‘Stagger meter with
attacks in the ravager role, then switching to commando to finish them. For
bosses, it's also key to debuff them just before the stagger takes effect

RIGHT The casino is a particular
disappointment. Only chocobo
racing and slot machines are
available, both of which are poor
distractions, but the real insult is
the staff who tell you to watch out
for when they finish construction
of the other areas. In other words,
certain games have been left out
for introduction later via DLC.

The same issues apply for the
character Sazh: he apparently exists
in Final Fantasy XIII-Z's world, but
in fact this is another DLC lead-in

EDGE 103

Press the buttons jnj-onder!

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= = "LED T x „5. д — а

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You can unleash ‘feral link’ attacks from
beast companions, and the quicker you
do the QTE, the more powerful they are

Why is Final Fantasy XII-2's move towards realtime combat so half-baked?

t certain points during FFXIII-2's

cutscenes, the word 'Live' appears in

the upper-left corner. It's a strange
juxtaposition, and one we're more used to
seeing on the evening news than in the midst
of an overwrought JRPG interstitial. But
Square Enix isn't trying to add a layer of
reality, it's warning players who have put
down the pad that their services will soon
be required. Hey, you — pay attention!

The ‘Live’ cue means there will soon be
a QTE, a finishing mechanic more familiar
from the likes of God Of War or Bayonetta
than the Final Fantasy series, and in the eyes
of FFXIII-2's developers this represents a
move towards realtime combat. Yoshinori
Kitase, the game's producer, even commented
to us in E236 that, "We see many players
moving away trom games that used turn-
based systems and towards what you might
term an action- RPG. That's a trend, and you
ignore things like that at your peril.” This
remark caused not a little consternation
among the series' many fans.

Final Fantasy is one of gaming's global
brands, a franchise that sells as well in the
west as it does in the east — for the time
being. It is used to being top dog. But now
it's being squeezed from both sides, and the
standard of competition is higî. Last. year saw

104

both Dark Souls and Xenoblade Chronicles
arrive from Japanese studios, while from the
west there was Skvrim, and in a few months
BioWare will round off the Mass Effect trilogy.
None of those games are alike, but you
suspect it's Dark Souls and Mass Effect 3 that
have caused concern at Square Enix HQ.
Heads have clearly turned among Final
Fantasy's developers, because there's no other
reason for FFXIII-2 to incorporate realtime
elements into the ATB system — one of the
best turn-based fighting setups ever created
- nor for producers to drop vague hints about
a more action-oriented future for the series.

The problem with toe dipping like this is
that it doesn't satisfy. The inconsistent
appearance of QTEs and their ease means
they're a mild irritation rather than a thrilling
injection of realtime action, and they sit
terribly uneasily next to the battle animations
you see thousands of times in rotation.

This disjointedness can also be seen
with the Moogle Clock. Here, enemies spawn
pre-battle, during which time you can hit
them with your weapon via a button press.
It's presented as a realtime action in the
overworld, but all it does is start the ‘proper’
turn-based fight, giving you the first turn.
Your character is performing a hitting
anime don, but if you hit enemies, you're

not actually hitting them. Does that make
sense? Of course it doesn't — and, as you
might well imagine, controlling your character
during the Moogle Clock sequences doesn't
feel anything like controlling a character in a
thirdperson combat game.

Final Fantasy is not a realtime world — not
when it comes to combat. And that's not a
problem. What is strange about FFXIIT-2 is
the attempt to bolt realtime action onto its
turn-based structure. It feels out of place, and
that's because it is. RPGs have been blending
turn-based systems with realtime elements
for many vears now, but the truly great ones
build evervthing around this. In FFXIII-2, you
have a couple of realtime mechanics (and not
especially ambitious ones) layered on top of a
structure that wasn't designed for them, and
that doesn't reallv need them either.

[t may well be the case that Final Fantasy
XIV takes the series in a radical new direction.
Some would say, given recent history, it has
no choice. It is a great pity, as well as a great
irony, that Square Enix created the thrilling
ATB system from its turn-based legacy, but
has thus far been unable to make a Final
Fantasy game that deserves it. If the future
of the series is realtime combat, it's hard to
escape the feeling that the baby may slide
out of the frame along with the bath water.

www.pegi.info

8 ‘INVOLVING, REWARDING AND MOMENTOUS'

- EUROGAMER

_ TOP-NOTCH RETRO FUN’
- FHM

Naughty Dog

agaci S LAT and “Jak 3° are trademarks ı

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PlayStation

БОМҮ

make. beleve

Wipeout 2048

в Sony embraces the future with its new Vita
handheld, Studio Liverpool rewinds the timeline
of its poster-child sci-fi racer. Now grounded in
a more relatable near-future setting, Wipeout 2048
trades the futurism of, say, Wipeout HD or Fury for an
earthier tone than fans may expect. As such, many
tracks have wide lanes and are surrounded by
contemporary-style architecture, drawing on the
modern more than the imaginary.

[t’s a less exciting visual treatment than the series’
more typical — and luminous — industrial sci-fi, and
the blander setting is yoked to some disarmingly easy
initial stages. At first, it feels as if Studio Liverpool has
loosened up to make way for casual newcomers to Vita,
but the difficulty spikes considerably in the second of
the three seasons, seeing the Al step up and tracks
become more intimate. As races and challenges go from
cosy to cutthroat, success requires a hop into the
options to remove pilot assist along with a toggle into
the firstperson camera view to secure those extra inches
of racing line. It sounds serious, and it is — 2048 has
not abandoned the series’ hardcore sensibilities, but
simply provided an entry point for a more casual crowd.
One case in point where well-honed twitch reactions
are rewarded is the game's ‘skill-cuts) which provide a
get-out clause for those who have been unfairly
overwhelmed by a bad hand of pick-ups. These
shortcuts require razor-sharp timing of sidesteps —
double-taps of the air brake that strafe your craft left
or right — and demand dedication to master.

Indeed, learning 2048's tracks inside and out is
as crucial as in the best Wipeouts, and Vita's responsive
thumbsticks are more than capable of handling vour
delicate (or nervous) twitches, meaning you only have
vourself to blame for botched barrel rolls. Speed pads
and power-ups are the cornerstones of many challenges,
and the restrictions laid out by the designers remix
tracks to brilliant, nail-biting effect, with a cannon
and leech-beam race through the Downtown map being
a particular standout. The focus in 2048, more than any
other Wipeout besides Fury, is combat. The wider lanes
enable the team to squeeze more craft and effects
onscreen, and give you the leeway to bob and weave
as you rattle off an array of projectiles and mines.

Sadly, Wipeout 2048 routinely forces you to
contend with the barrage of detail in each stage. With
all the grittier textures, it's sometimes difficult to
make out the track from the world bevond it. For
once, Vita's screen feels small as you anxiously
memorise tracks framed by towering architecture and
populated with elements appropriate to the setting,
from flocks of birds to confetti and floating balloons.
Furthermore, with a group of warring racers onscreen,
the framerate can suffer. It's not game-breaking, and
it doesn't deter you from pressing on, but it is

106

PLAY

Publisher SCE

Developer In-house (Studio Liverpool)
Format Vita

Release Ош now (Japan),

February 22 (EU, US)

The climactic
campaign duels
can be ranked
alongside some
of the series’
adrenaline-
pumping highs

noticeable in a series built on speed and against the
6ofps perfection of Wipeout HD.

That said, Combat (previously known as Eliminator)
and Zone modes also make the transition to 2048, and
while the former in particular falls victim to framerate
and visibility issues, Zone sees the game at its
smoothest and most addictive. The later SOL and
Empire Climb maps closely capture the ambitious,
intricate layouts of classic Wipeout, and the game's
climactic campaign duels can be ranked alongside
some of the series’ adrenaline-pumping high points.

Of course, a core component of any Wipeout is the
soundscape, and here, as a Liverpudlian might put it,
2048 is sound as a pound. From the sonic boom of a
speed pad to the robotic soundbites that announce
pick-ups, the audio is as rich and detailed as the
backdrops. The licensed music tracks have clearly
been selected to complement the onscreen action,
too, but it's a shame 2048 doesn't allow for custom
soundtracks, and the playlist is a little lean.

A multiplayer campaign, cleverly threaded
together with an unlock structure that mirrors the
singleplaver game, adds weight and value to the package.
It brings a unique slant to Vita’s solid online potential,
essentially gamifying your experience with friends by
encouraging you to pursue objectives across randomly
selected maps to progress. With a raft of unlockables to
collect, this re-engineering of a campaign game for
multiple users is one of 2048's key successes.

Ad Нос play also features randomly assigned modes
and tracks, offering voting options between sessions,
but never handing full customisation over to hosts. The
general lack of matchmaking options throughout is an
interesting design choice, presumably intended to
discourage power-hungry hosting, but it may also turn
out to be a frustration for users looking to get a fix of a
particular map and mode with friends. But Vita’s Near
certainly makes game hunting feel much more personal
than trawling through lobbies, and it's therefore 2048 —
of all the launch games — that most strongly hints at
the handheld’s online social potential.

Overall, then, Wipeout 2048 shines brightest in
the relative serenity of multiplayer, with four or fewer
racers on the track. The blinkers on the online segment
focus the experience further, channelling its thrills into
unpredictable bite-size moments, and heightening the
sense of achievement and reward.

Yes, Wipeout 2048 conjures a less fanciful racing
grid than we've seen previously, and it's also a less
immaculate, less finessed racer than the home console
iterations of the series we've played down the vears.
Instead, it's an attempt to try something new on the
newest of platforms. While it may not offer
something for everyone, when it flies, it soars.

LEFT Part of the Wipeout
experience, alongside precision
steering and weapon management,
is looking good. Unlockable skins
for ships can give you a stylistic
edge over your opposition.

BELOW Explosions and effects
bring their own splashes of colour
to the often vibrant stages. It's
good they re beautiful, because
2048's emphasis on combat means
you'll be seeing them frequently

| 3 Да ae IR
ABOVE Empire Climb and SOL provide the best examples of Vita's polygon-
pushing power. They also see 2048 at its most vertiginous, with previously
towering structures becoming mere specks on a distant urban canvas

EDGE 107

PLAY

Post Script

Interview: the Wipeout 2048 creative team explains how it reimagined the hovercrait racer

‚ ame directors Graeme Ankers and Stuart

ma Tilley, along with art director Lee Carus, saw
w” Wipeout 2048 through from inception to launch

at SCE Studio Liverpool. They detail the philosophy

behind bringing a bit of reality back to the brand.

Why did you choose the more grounded sci-fi
flavour that pervades Wipeout 2048?

Graeme Ankers We wanted to do something different.
HD and Fury had reached a sort of excellence in terms
of what they could do in terms of design and aesthetic.
[They were] almost the pinnacle of the sport, too, in
terms of where Wipeout was and where it was going
200 years from now. We said, “OK, what would the start
of the sport be like? Season one, race one.” There’s a
whole rich area of the Wipeout universe we'd almost
taken for granted and left it out there as assumed
knowledge. As we do with a lot of things, we started
with the visual side. We started with the aesthetic and
it permeated all the way through.

Lee went about building this brave new world on top
of the existing brownstone structures at street level,
getting a sense of the depravity of the city. So when vou
get to the top of this world, it's where it'll eventually
evolve to in HD and Fury. It also had a real [effect] on
the gameplay; it wasn't just an art direction thing.

We took the city-based approach to try some new types
of gameplay, like widening the tracks — that was a big
call to make early on. The emphasis was more on
fighting than hitting blind corner after blind corner.
Then we added the skill-cuts in to allow that kind of
play: picking lines through the city.

Lee Carus Because of the approach, we've got a bit of
both [near and distant sci-fi] in there. We've got the
classic Wipeout look — sleek, smooth lines and futurism
— but mixed in with architecture people can relate to.

I remember when I first pitched the idea to the senior
art team here. I came in with some rough paint-overs of Lee Carus, art director
New York, and within a few minutes [of discussion] the

guys were buying into it in a big way. There's something

in there for everyone now. Having more recognisable

architecture will appeal to more people.

Did this approach get in the way of the technical
aspects at all? What is the official framerate?

Stuart Tilley A rock-steady 30fps. We locked it down
to 30 to make sure the gameplay wasn't affected. With
more combat -style racing, more intense racing, you
tend to have more ships onscreen than previous
Wipeouts, and a lot closer [together]. There tends to be
a little more going on. We decided if we could make a
smooth 3ofps, we knew the game would still be great to
play and would allow us to [play around more] with the

108 EDGE

Graeme Ankers, game director

art style and effects. It's a trade: we could have tried for
бо, but then have had to make а cut somewhere else.

[ think we made the right decision; it feels slick
throughout, it’s a competent 30. When you're jumping
in and out is when you notice the framerate. I hope
people who plav it will see it's still pretty silkv.

You've experimented with wider tracks before, most
prominently in Fusion on PS2. What informed that
decision? Was it a concession to casual players?

ST We didn't want the player to be bouncing around
the track for the first few hours trving to master it. We
wanted it to be straight in — getting wing-to-wing,
blowing up the bad guys, trying different modes and
having a really good time the moment they start the
game. There's still some real challenge there as well, we
haven't made it a casual game by any stretch of the
imagination. We've actually got Wipeout's fastest -ever
speed class, Super Phantom, and it wouldn't have
worked if the tracks weren't this wide. You've got that
extreme challenge towards the back end of the game.

Wipeout has a fixed timeline. How did you tell the
story of the series through track design?

LC We still want people to realise that this is a real-
world location — we have road markings, etc — but we
wanted a strong delineation when you reached a piece of
next-generation technology. The tracks are constructed
around a living world — imagine these events have been
constructed by engineers, like how when Monaco comes
to town in Fi; that's how we thought of it.

Why was multiplayer turned into a campaign?

GA One of the key philosophies was — and this is the
first time we've had a campaign multiplayer — was to
utilise Vita's connected, social potential. Not just one-
off races online, but to build a full campaign, a full sense
of a whole world of races going on outside of the
singleplaver experience. The secondary objectives and
agendas were a big part of that, and piping that
information down to the frontend canvas menu so
you're always in touch with your online players, you've
always got those races going on. It’s not all about
winning — it can be about destroying someone's ship.
The high-level philosophy was to push the challenge
online, get people going online, fighting it out, and give
incentives for those secondary objectives to build a
really rich relationship with the online community.

ST One of the things we tried to do was get you online
with objectives that didn’t require you to be a 1,000-
hour ninja from the get-go. Usually when you go online
with a game it takes a long time to get into it; here you
can be completing objectives from the first race. №

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PLAY

Star Wars: The Old Republic

tar Wars: The Old Republic is an MMORPG that

ь prioritises its RPG side over that MMO prefix. As

F such, BioWare has produced thousands of pages of
backstory, and poured an unknowable amount of cash
into voicing each and every story mission, side quest
and snippet of incidental dialogue. The result is that
The Old Republic provides a sense of personal belonging
unmatched by almost any other MMOG. The galaxy far,
far away feels welcoming, and it should: it’s a place built
entirely for vou, the player. That's ‘player; singular; no
matter what your class is, you're the only hero who
matters. Where other MMOGs show your existence as
part of a wider ecosystem, BioWare shields you from it.

The game's galaxy — frozen some three-and-a-bit-
thousand vears before the films — is broken up into
instances, with lifts and doors whisking shut behind
players as they step into their own bubbles. Making
vour way from planet to planet involves walking alone
to your berthed ship, clambering aboard, setting your
course, climbing out, making vour way through the
docking bay and then arriving at your destination. Were
it not for the general chat ticking away in the corner, at
no point during that journey would you be aware you
were sharing a server with thousands of other people.

Yet by making each player the centre of its universe,
The Old Republic has gained a narrative backbone. Each
class has its own three-act arc that planet -hops around
the galaxy. These central'class quests' stand up to light
scrutiny against other solo RPGs, and they're 12 parsecs
ahead of most MMOG questlines. The voices behind
the main classes are equally memorable: the male
bounty hunter is a man of few, gravelly words; the
female trooper is efficient and action-oriented. While
most MMOGs leave characterisation to the player, The
Old Republic projects its characters outwards at you.

Scope for defining your character, however, comes
in shaping their moral code. Here, that code is often
binary: sometimes vou'll get an ethical conundrum —
the Jedi outlaw love, for example, making any potential
trysts vou spot inherently naughty — but you'll usually
be choosing between good and comically nasty. Your
choices pay out in dark or light side points, rewarding
you with access to gear later on. Choose a path of grev
areas and vou'll be left floundering in the middle.
Playing that unknown quantity isn't game-destroying —
vou still get loot — but it's obvious that the morality
BioWare is peddling is Star Wars’ black-and-white
version. And while The Old Republic's galaxy has to
remain mostly static to work as an MMOG, the impact
of your choices becomes apparent in the game's four-
person 'flashpoints: In these gatherings, players share
everything, including conversations, and a random roll
system means each of you has equal opportunities to
chime in and redirect the path of a mission, making
these repeatable quests narratively engaging.

110

Publisher EA
Developer BioWare
Format PC

Release Out now

The galaxy far,
far away feels
welcoming,
and it should:
it’s а place built
entirely for you,
the player

JEDI MINE TRICK

The Old Republic's crafting
system is deceptively simple —
send your companion off on
missions that take real time and
return item rewards — but it
strokes that part of your cortex
that likes getting something for
seemingly nothing. Having
Khem Val, nightmarish monster
man, pop back from a six-
minute jaunt with a new idea
for a hat is always enjoyable.
There's a neat complication,
too: select three skills that tie
together and you can act as
one-crew sweatshop, first
digging for, then refining,

then turning found materials
into saleable goodies.

Conversations invariably lead to combat, which is
the same stylised skill bar manipulation as seen in the
majority of The Old Republic's MMOG peers. To genre
newcomers, the concepts of ability management and
rotation are quickly off-putting, and the game does
little to make battles more comprehensible for non-
natives. Skill trees are riddled with arcane language:
preexisting concepts such as pushbacks and cooldowns
are combined with new ways to measure damage and
delivered without cipher. Experienced MMOG players
won't find anything to trouble them here, but given the
game's massmarket appeal and solo-play friendliness,
a little more transparency would be appreciated.

Even with a weight of MMOG experience under
vour belt, some of the foibles of combat can frustrate.
For healers, targeting correctly can be nightmarish.
Some attacks suffer from a muted animation, too,
making their effects difficult to discern in the midst of
battle. The inquisitor's Affliction talent, for instance,
starts as a tiny ball of shadowy grey smoke, and coats
the target in a hard-to-spot miasma. But most talents
are loud, brash, and easy to spot — an inquisitor
specialising in lightning attacks, say, launches great
arcing bolts of flickering energy at enemies.

The game's classes are surprisingly distinct, too.
The eight on offer have been split into analogous
pairings across the two factions, but specialisation is
encouraged from level ten. Thus the imperial agent can
become either a sniper or an operative build, each with
an obvious purpose: long-range damage for the sniper,
healing for the operative. What's more, the three skill
trees mean vou're free to make a backstabbing operative
with access to emergency medical supplies, or a sniper
who can control an army of tiny robots while hiding
behind a bin. It's a setup that means almost all group
makeups are viable for joint quests.

And playing as a group is the best way to see the
game, enabling vou to dip in and out of the bespoke
cutscenes your class choice wouldn't otherwise get to
watch. Conversely, hit the grind treadmill too hard —
you're looking at upwards of five solid days of playtime
to hit the level cap of so — and The Old Republic's charm
is lost, the stories spun out by voiceovers dissipating
against the orders to kill another 25 somethings.

BioWare hasn't cast itself as a guerrilla movement
trying to subvert the MMOG with The Old Republic.
Instead it's been the Empire, working to produce a slick,
gigantic experience that, in the time of free-to-play,
feels polished enough to demand monthly fees. How
long this empire — vast and imposing, but archaic in
structure — will last in the face of newer MMOGs and
their rebellious payment models isn't easy to discern.
This isn't the first of a new order of MMORPG,
but it may well be the last of the old. | |

RIGHT Space missions are available
as soon as you get your ship, and
play at sub-5tar Fox level. They re
not particularly engaging, but pick
up the relevant daily quests from
your ship's nav computer and they
pay out in fat chunks of experience.
BELOW Most of the time, The

Old Republic isn't as pretty as its
singleplayer peers. But if you take a
moment during questing to tilt the
camera upwards, you'll often be
rewarded with an impressive vista

ABOVE Some races are split by faction — the blind, force-strong Miraluka
are reserved for the Republic, while the russet-coloured pureblood Sith are
confined to the Empire — and some are also limited to a particular class

Conversations work like they do in Mass Effect, giving you a wheel of responses to choose from. Mouse over the options to see an icon indicating whether a choice is a dark or light action e

The Old Republic has a glitz
rarely seen in fresh MMORPGs,
but it's founded on mechanics
that were set down years ago

or those unversed in the conventions
us of the MMOG genre, The Old Republic

presents a high barrier to entry that's
entirely at odds with its IP's broad appeal.
Characters skate along the surface of an
immutable game world. Dead enemies have
replacements phased in to prowl the same
streets their immediate predecessors failed to
protect. Crippling myopia afflicts all: NPCs
onlv raise a blaster in anger if you step within
half-hearted spitting radius of them. And
pushed up against its offline action peers, The
Old Republic in full flow looks stilted and
artificial. While the former reward button
jabs with immediate and kinetic actions, The
Old Republic's attacks sit along a hotbar, are
activated with number key presses, and are
usually subject to some kind of cooldown.
BioWare's game, for all its newness, is still
bound by MMOG conventions.

It's claimed genetic traits sometimes skip
a generation, but not so for MMOGs, whose
designers have seemingly agreed to freeze
their development around the concepts
thrown up by pen-and-paper roleplaying
games. The holy trinity of player classes —
healer, pain-absorbing ‘tank’ and damage-
dealing ‘DPS’ — are utterly integral to the
«genre, They appear again іп The Old Republic,

varying subtly in possible approach. For |

112

The light and dark sides of relying on MMOG convention

instance, tanking classes now use ranged
attacks over melee ones, but this simply
means standing a bit farther away.

This kind of ancestor worship perpetuates
design decisions that may alienate novice
MMOG players. The most obvious of these
is in player vs player (PvP) combat. Huttball —
a murderous version of rugby — is obtuse,
arcane, and over-deep. The winning team has
to hustle a ball over their opposition’s goal
line, the first to six winning the bout. But
whoever's carrying the ball is the immediate
focal point of ten other characters — from 16
different advanced classes, each with access to
three skill trees — all hurling attacks, slows,
control moves, buffs, debuffs and heals.

The ancient tropes are also found in
solitary or small-group pursuits. The quest
design underpinning The Old Republic's
thicklv layered storv is largely uncomplicated,
often asking you to kill 15 wotsits, pick up five
thingies, and bring them back to Sergeant
whatshisface. This familiar feeling can even
be compounded by the spikes of excitement
delivered during the moments of high drama
in the game's story-centric sections. Where
World Of Warcraft undersold its quests with a
block of easily skipped text, The Old Republic's
voice-acted characters outpouring grandiose
words about the gl

ie glorious journey you're about

to head on in order to kill ten space rats can
sometimes expose the grind in a harsher light.
The things BioWare has bolted onto the
MMOG template add little mechanically, too:
class quests are regular quests with much
better presentation, and space missions are
shooting gallery distractions at best.

And they won't last forever. At level
50, the new story content dries up (to be
augmented later, we presume). Cut loose from
fresh narrative elements, players are left with
only the old MMOG mechanics to rely on for
enjoyment. But even after all these years, this
bedrock of familiar quests and class systems
is enough to hold your attention. The
rhythms of killing, looting and levelling still
exert a vice-like grip on the human brain, and
fatigue with the formula fades into memory
when your character is surrounded by the
cheerful holographic ding of a new level
earned. Would you keep playing without this
positive reinforcement? And would you keep
playing together without those established
class roles? MMOGs haven't changed partly
because they've become so successful at
tapping into the lizard brains of players, and
to switch approach now could be commercial
suicide. The Old Republic's major innovation —
story — is a classy varnish, but chipped away
it reveals a solid substance underneath. №

m e
„й o E кА |

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ARE

Uncharted: Golden Abyss

| big screen. His adventures beg for the IMAX
treatment just to wring every possible drop of drama
from each collapsing staircase, exploding vehicle and
vertiginous leap. So can the Uncharted franchise survive
the untheatrical confines of a handheld, or is Drake’s
appeal rooted in dramatic scripting backed up by
formidable technical power and expertise?

The truth is, when held up against its PS3 peers,
Uncharted: Golden Abyss can’t help seeming a bit
straight-to-DVD. The epic, rolling set-pieces of Among
Thieves and Drake’s Deception won’t be found here; there
are no death-defying train rides or capsizing cargo
ships, and certainly no moments spent free-falling
from the back of a plane. Things do fall apart in Golden
Abyss, but they do so one piece at a time — the scale is
smaller and the environments are more static.

That doesn’t make them any less visually arresting,
and there are plenty of locations that will have vou
scrutinising your Vita's display with all the awed
wonder of Drake examining a priceless archaeological
find. Golden Abyss’s Central American jaunt takes in
the usual array of temples at sunset and ruins at dawn,
with plenty of long-forgotten underground caverns
connecting the two. Sony Bend shies away from
attempting the urban environments of Naughty Dog’s
most recent games, however, and offers nothing you
haven't seen before in their place. But it's a marvel to
hold all this beauty in your hands nonetheless.

The cast isn't quite as convincing as its bigger-
screen counterpart — faces seem less animated,
movements slightly more stiff — although the detail on
Drake's dirt-flecked cheeks has made it across intact.
The story these characters tell is less gripping, too,
lacking a strong sense of direction from the off. The
problem is compounded by a weak villain who lacks
either the bone-evil threat of Lazarevic in Among
Thieves or the mystery of Marlowe in Drake's Deception.
And while the historical puzzle that Drake and new
girl Marisa Chase attempt to unravel is genuinely
intriguing, it's also convoluted enough that you'll find
vourself subjected to a little too much exposition along
the way. Nolan North remains dependably charming as
the voice of Drake, however, and there are enough twists
and turns to see you through to the game's conclusion.

But even if Golden Abyss suffers in comparison to
the astonishingly high production standards of the PS3
titles, it holds up on its own as an action game. It's a
pity to discover that Naughty Dog's two sequels' worth
of refinements to the core combat mechanics haven't
made it across — forget riot shields, gas canisters and
tossing back grenades here — but Golden Abyss does
make use of Vita's motion and touch controls to
define a combat style of its own.

114

Release Out now (Japan),
February 27 (EU, US)

Golden Abyss
makes use of
Vita's motion
and touch
controls to
define a combat
style of its own

ore than most heroes in gaming, twinkly eved Publisher SCE The combination of analogue and gyroscopic
matinee idol Nathan Drake was made for the ا‎ ENE ио) aiming feels near-perfect, offering a subtle touch of

finely granulated control that should persuade even the
most long-standing motion-control sceptic of its uses.
Vita’s analogue sticks are reliable, sure, but for a quick
headshot it’s often easier to slightly tilt the unit than
risk nudging the reticule a centimetre too far. With
default controls, lining up a sniper scope on your target
relies entirely on the gyroscope (with touchscreen or
touchpad swipes adjusting zoom), and quickly becomes
second nature. Grenades, meanwhile, can be dragged
and dropped exactly where they’re needed, while
directional prompts add an unpredictable QTE

element to hand-to-hand combat.

Slightly less successful are Golden Abyss’s
navigation controls. Tracing the route you want Drake
to take when scaling ruins works reliably, but has the
effect of making the experience seem semi-automated.
That said, more of those directional prompts mean that
moments when handholds crumble to dust rise beyond
just a scripted thrill — the player has to join Drake in
making a sudden grab for purchase.

If the touchscreen implementation stopped there,
Golden Abyss would perfectly showcase what Vita's
new control methods can bring to traditional games.
Unfortunately, it also repeats a handful of chore-like
touchscreen puzzles. Making charcoal rubbings
certainly adds a hint of practical archaeology to
Uncharted's gung-ho treasure hunting, but it's just
wiping your finger across the screen. And cleaning the
dirt off discovered artefacts would simply be more of
the same were it not for the fact vou have to awkwardly
rotate the object with the rear touchpad at the same
time. But at least these tasks can be performed with the
minimum of engagement — a repeated jigsaw puzzle
(Drake seems to stumble upon a great many torn-up
documents in this adventure) manages to be that
painful combination of both unexciting and mildly
taxing. More traditional puzzles work better, but there's
still nothing like Drake's Deception's room of shadows.

Take away the set-pieces, take away the scale, take
away the regular writers and most of the supporting
cast, and what's left? Well, there's Drake, who still has
more charm in his trigger finger than the majority of
games' thick-necked leads in their entire bruising
frames. There's also the beauty of Uncharted's exotic
locales, which act as a great showcase for Vita's
astonishing display. And even if Golden Abyss starred a
power-armoured space marine fighting his way across
the cardboard-box planet, it would still be a robust
thirdperson shooter, the likes of which we've simply
never seen on a handheld. The core Uncharted
experience is still here, in other words. It's
stripped a little bare, but it's just about enough.

137 wer

1011118

ABOVE Some characters just look
right when lugging a minigun
around. Master Chief is one, Marcus
Fenix is another. Drake is not one
of them. № doesn't stop the gun
producing results, however

LEFT Touchscreen-based combat
works when integrated into an
average qunfight, but a couple
of QTE-heavy boss encounters
take the concept a little too far

Ken. wS

- d

Je Yum ilr aw

NC T

RIGHT It's slightly easier to pick out climbable surfaces than in the Р53
instalments — they're painted brighter colours, and inconsistently sport
an eye-catching gleam effect that reminds us of Ninja Theory's Enslaved

PLAY

The Darkness II

t first, The Darkness II feels more like a stylistic
reboot than a straight sequel. With development
duties passed from Starbreeze to Dark Sector
studio Digital Extremes, the first order of business has
been to replace the original's grimy aesthetic with a
cel-shaded look more faithful to its comic-book source
material. Faces are better animated, their features more
pronounced, and everything's outlined in thick strokes
of ink; you'd be forgiven for feeling that if you're
playing a sequel to anvthing, it's Ubisoft's XIIT. It's à
striking change, but just the first and most obvious
way in which The Darkness II differs from its forebear.

It's been nearly five years since the original, and
shooters have changed a great deal in the interim. Call
Of Duty's dominance cannot be ignored, and hasn't
been: its control scheme and much of its weaponry are
invoked here, as is its multiplayer mode's barrage of
onscreen text after kills. Activision's shooter has also
lowered the bar for campaign length, and Digital
Extremes has duly served up an eight-hour singleplayer
carrving barely an ounce of fat. But the biggest change
is that this is an action game through and through.

[n the original, protagonist Jackie Estacado's
demonic shoulder-mounted tentacles were sometimes
used for stealth, to foresee danger and to deal with it
from a distance. Now they're instruments of death and
death alone. A tap of the right bumper produces a quick,
horizontal slash, two of which will do for most enemies.
The left tentacle can be used to grab and throw objects;
pick up weapons, ammo, and trinkets; and destroy
doors. This initially basic moveset can be expanded over
time through a skill tree that's accessed from mid-level
shrines, with new abilities purchased using the 'dark
essence' acquired from kills. The more creative the kill,
the more essence awarded. It's similar to Bulletstorm,
but a far simpler version of that system, with no combo
meter and no penalty for repeating the same tricks.

Eventually, Estacado can channel The Darkness to
greatly increase bullet damage, and deploy a demonic
swarm to disorient enemies. But it doesn't end there:
grab a stunned enemy and tap one of the face buttons
to drain health, steal ammo, or conjure a shield or black
hole from the Darkness. Moments such as these add
variety, require quick thinking (foes keep shooting as
they dangle in front of you), and provide a respite from
the chaos as a canned animation of the tentacles doing
their visceral work plays out, with Estacado immune
from damage until all the squelching is over.

In terms of the fiction behind all this bloodshed,
Estacado has managed to keep his unholy powers at bay
during the two years since the first game's events, but
soon reawakens them following the appearance of the
Brotherhood — a shadowy organisation that was the
original keeper of the Darkness an `1
Estacado’s spent the intervening ре

116

Vic EN

Publisher 2К Games

Developer Digital Extremes
Format 360 (version tested), P53, PC
Release Out now

It’s genuinely
discomfiting as
you try to parse
reality from
flashbacks from
hallucinations
conjured by

the Darkness

MADE MEN

The game's multiplayer offering
is Vendettas mode, a standalone
campaign that's playable in
ca-op or even offline on your
own. A series of shootouts and
boss fights linked by cutscenes,
the narrative runs in parallel to
that of the main game, with a
welcome focus on the manic
Powell. Players are cast as one
of four characters, each with
their own powers, but none
comes close to Estacado's
demonic limbs. This means

an increased focus on basic
gunplay, which dilutes the
appeal, and the mode quickly
becomes stale, given there's

{ fane, hu eath the gruesome veneer lies a
S ce Veit or not — genuine tenderness.

loss of his childhood sweetheart, Jenny, who was
murdered in the previous game before his eves.

She may be dead, but Estacado's inability to let go
means Jenny reappears in hallucinatory flashbacks.
Returning comic-book writer Paul Jenkins pens an
intricate tale that flits between reality, the Jenny
flashbacks and repeated visits to a mental hospital,
where Estacado's a patient and his mob underlings take
on the roles of doctors, orderlies and fellow inmates,
with Jenny cast as a nurse. It's a genuinely discomfiting
experience as you try to parse reality from flashbacks
from Darkness-conjured hallucinations. The one
constant is Johnny Powell, who's equally manic in real
life as he is in the mental hospital, all bulging eves and
flailing arms and conspiracy theories. He's the maddest
man in the game, but also the most in the know. In the
few quiet moments, smart, sporadic use of licensed
music lends real-world credence to the ultraviolent,
supernatural fantasy that pervades elsewhere.

It's fortunate that the storytelling’s smart,
because everything else about The Darkness IT is
earnestly dumb. While Estacado and the Darkness

are pleasures to control, there's little strategy to the
combat: you use assault rifles or SMGs from range, and
shotguns or tentacles up close, with only the presence
of power-sapping light forcing a change of tack. The
latter requires a degree of forward planning in shooting
out streetlights, destroying generators and, later on,
smart reactions to avoid the Darkness-savvy
Brotherhood's torches, flashbangs and vehicles with
full-beam headlights. Enemies get tougher — whip
wielders can disarm you from range, others can teleport
up close or behind you — but there’s little to stop you
ploughing through the game using proven tactics.

It's also cringeworthy at times thanks to your
Darkling accomplice, a demon with the skin of a cat on
his head and a Union Jack across his chest, presumably
to confirm his intended nationality despite his
Antipodean tone. He urinates on fallen enemies, utters
an endless stream of mockney filth, and calls you
‘monkey’ You can kill him, but he keeps coming back.

Yet there’s an awful lot to like. Weedy SMGs aside,
the gunplay is rock solid, and your evolving Darkness
powers encourage experimentation, elevating what
would otherwise be a rote shooter. And while the
screenshots suggest a hyper-violent fantasy take on the
well-worn Mafia tale, The Darkness II is a love story at
its core, Estacado doesn’t seek mob dominance, the
death of the Brotherhood, or victory over the Darkness:
his every act is motivated by the loss of the love of his
life, and his desire to see her rest in peace, so that he
can find it too. It's derivative, gratuitous and needlessly

ABOVE Much has been made of quad-wielding, but sticking to one firearm
is more effective, freeing up the left trigger and allowing you to aim down
the sights. Dual-wielders do get the benefit of generous aim assist, though

ABOVE You'll spend a lot of time
gazing at hapless goons dangling
in front of you while you decide
which of the four executions is of
greater benefit to you. The canned
animations that follow quickly
become repetitive, however.

LEFT This would be a much poorer
game without Jenny, and Paul
Jenkins has done a fine job of
making her relevant. A fairground
flashback, and a touching moment
after the credits, come close to
matching the romantic high of the
original's touching sofa scene

uch has been said about Kingdoms Of Amalur’s
| 10,000-year backstory, concocted by fantasy
author RA Salvatore to act as a springboard

for 38 Studios’ future projects. The result of all his
efforts is that the world of Amalur comes steeped in
lore, with NPCs spouting out a wiki's worth of info for
even the most innocuous ‘kill x rats’ task. It’s certainly
as comprehensive as any virtual historv in recent
memory, and yet arrives in a game intent on cutting
through the RPG fat, presenting a more accessible take
on the open-world RPG. How do you present an
unforgiving fiction in a forgiving world?

What arrives on shop shelves is an epic RPG with
a user-friendly pick-up-and-play ethos. This most
obviously manifests itself in the responsive player
character. If you've hacked and slashed a bloody path
through God Of War, you won’t need any introduction
to Reckoning’s combination of button mashing, evasive
dodges and timed parries. That each weapon is limited
to one button prevents complexity but welcomes
experimentation — equip a new weapon and you're only
a few prods away from mastering it. Combat isn’t deep,
but it is wide, thanks to multiple weapon classes and
the mountains of loot within them.

That your barbarian/rogue/wizard wouldn't feel out
of place in a straight thirdperson action game is а real
achievement, especially following Skyrim’s weightless
avatars. The game it most closely resembles is Fable П —
Lionhead’s own attempt to tame the excesses of the
RPG. But in the light of this, Fable IT lacked combat
conviction; Reckoning is tougher and it hits harder.
Amalur's varied bestiary provides a blend of short- and
long-range combat rhythms, and some suitably visceral
feedback — the slow-motion clang of sword on shield,
the gruesome hiss of arterial spray — that lends the
game a full-blooded energy.

Of course, lowering the barriers to entry can
also negate the gratification felt from the obstacles you
overcome. Ranged combat, for example, employs an
auto-aim that removes all the skill from the player. So
while bows and projectile-spewing staves work well
enough as secondary support to a stabbing implement,
they are deeply unsatisfying in themselves. It doesn't
help that target switching is mapped to the right
analogue stick, which is nigh-on impossible to reach
in tandem with the face buttons. In a way, Reckoning
reverses Skyrim’s dilemma: where the firstperson
perspective struggles to mesh well with hand-to-hand
duels, it is the true home of projectiles.

Reckoning never quite balances accessibility with
the depth expected from an RPG either. Systems are
present and correct — smithing, alchemy, sagecrafting
(think: Elder Scrolls’ soul gems) — but are streamlined
into neat little asides. There are too few collectible

118

Publisher ЕА

Developer 38 5tudios/Big Huge Games
Format 360 (tested), PC, P53

Release Qut now

Part of the
appeal of an
RPG is losing

yourself, which

is impossible if
the entire game
is a deliberately
beaten track

Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning

components to sell these crafts as organic parts of the
Amalurian ecosystem. Where Skyrim’s alchemists have
to root around in the countryside in search of mystic
barks, their counterparts in Amalur need only walk up
to shiny pick-ups dotting the world. This is roleplaving
for a thunderously dull imagination.

Worse, this streamlining and simplifying is felt in
the very geographv of the place. Like Fable's Albion,
Amalur is a colossal landmass that's been divided into
manageable chunks. With its connecting corridors and
invisible walls, there's an artificiality to the world that
simply can't compete with the organic sprawl of
locations such as Tamriel. At the same time, the self-
contained structure allows the game's artists to conjure
a visual mix that would jar in one cohesive whole.
Moving from murky bog to verdant forest palaces to
lurid red desert captures a sense of adventurous scale,
which is more important than pure acreage.

Amalur's problem, like so many ideas in Reckoning,
is its refusal to ask too much of the plaver. Clarity
should be championed — in interface, control and item
management — but not to the extent that the world is
laid bare. Part of the appeal of RPGs is losing yourself in
a virtual place, which is impossible if the entire game is
a deliberately beaten track. For these reasons, Amalur is
a very easy world to drop in and out of — if only Skyrim
were so willing to share us with our real lives — but it is
never a place where we can truly put down roots. And
all this is a shame, since Salvatore's encyclopaedic
creation is something worth investing in.

Ultimately, it is the fiction most poorly served by
the game. Could mechanical immediacy ever be a
natural fit for an RPG of this size? Combat is mastered
in an hour, but is tasked with holding the player's
attention for upwards of 5o. So Reckoning's appeal soon
wanes, if only due to aching ligaments. And pushing
combat to the fore is a disservice to the storvtelling.
Bevond a flimsy stealth attack, our hero's vocabulary
consists of ‘hack’ and ‘slash’ limiting the anecdotes he
can tell. Slathering on lore and backstory gives killing
a fun context, but no amount of preamble can freshen
up another identikit dungeon with a texture reskin.

Tellingly, the game is as its best when questing
serves the lore. Visiting the gnome capital, for example,
shifts the focus to political intrigue as you serve the
machinations of small schemers with big ambitions.
An even better strand has heroes enacting famous elfin
stories, ensuring their history replays as written. As
each tale is completed vou assume the character's
identity, slowly ascending the ranks of elvish rovalty.
At its heart, Reckoning is an interesting tale about
disrupting cyclical fate — ironic, considering the game's
largely repetitive nature — and when the story gets to
shine, 38 Studios and Big Huge Games' friendlier 6
design presents a welcome change of pace. == |

® skip

ABOVE Combat takes a leaf out of Fable Ifs book by mapping each of the
disciplines to an individual button. Special abilities, such as a charged
sword thrust or a barrage of arrows, require a held button press to charge

LEFT The major downside of
Amalur's extensive lore is the
humourless performances used to
deliver it. NPCs stand rigidly before
you, spouting out fact after fact in
one of ten or so faux-British voices.
BELOW "Fate shifting' finishers add
a satisfyingly cinematic farewell
moment to combat. Each enemy
type gets their own takedown,
ranging from axes in the belly to
head-crushing hammer blows

fter the thirdperson cover shooter revolution —
_ which left roadie runs and crouching behind

walls reigning supreme — it's both refreshing
and jarring to dive into NeverDead's world of old-
fashioned open-air mayhem. The running and gunning

might be scrappy and anachronistic, but it's a game
brimming with oddball ideas, and moving too fast to
care about its rough edges. Designed by Metal Gear
Acid and Konami veteran Shinta Nojiri at UK-based
developer Rebellion, it largely ignores contemporary
genre norms in favour of its unique conceit: the main
character, gruff demon hunter Bryce, can't die. He can,
however, be torn limb from limb by his hellish foes.

This byproduct of immortality is central to combat.
Lose an arm and you can keep firing with the other as
the stray limb goes zipping around the room. Better vet,
intentionally throw an arm away and watch enemies
chase it like dogs after a bone. If you want your missing
limbs back, dive-roll into them and they'll handily
reattach to Bryce’s body, ready to be used once more.
Puzzles are few and far between, but they usually
require you to pop Bryce’s head off and roll it into
hard-to-reach areas (vou can also regenerate Bryce's
body when a meter fills back up). These are just a few
examples of NeverDead's lively experimentation around
a potentially macabre theme. It’s a game that revels in
quirky, silly thrills, an antidote for those now jaded by
the onslaught of sci-fi epics that take themselves —
and their mythologies — a little bit too seriously.

If the joys of everlasting life seem like they would
soon pall, however, Rebellion is aware of the need to
add a level of threat that stops NeverDead from simply
being a shooter with a constantly enabled God mode. So
if Bryce gets his head swallowed up by the Grandbaby
enemy type, it’s game over; and you'll also be banished
back to the last checkpoint if your sidekick/minder
Arcadia dies. The Grandbabies — little white giggling
balls of rolling evil — are at your heels every step of the
way, adding more urgency as you scramble to fit Bryce
back together again. And if vou do find yourself gulped
down by one of these Kirby-esque foes, you'll be given
one last shot at life via a brief QTE.

The XP vou earn and collect along the way can be
used to purchase new abilities at any time, although
you're given a limited number of slots to populate with
skills that, for example, can turn limbs into grenades or
initiate a state of slow motion when you're about to be
hit. The slot limit is intended to add a laver of strategic
thinking to all the shooting and diving, but simply
forces you to manically shuffle abilities around to suit
the situation. Abilities such as aim lock for targeting
airborne enemies are vital, and when combined with the
drip feed of weapons (all capable of being dual-wielded),
add depth to what is otherwise a shallow game loop.
Progression is all about clearing areas of demonic

PLAY

NeverDead

Publisher Konami
Developer Rebellion
Format 360, РУЗ
Release Qut now

Lose an arm
and you can
keep firing with
the other as

the stray limb
zips around
the room

> your head « few too many times along the way.

nasties before eventually taking on one of the game's
colourful, extravagant bosses. Unusual as some of the
monsters are (the fluorescent ‘Hippo’ is a recurring
highlight), there's a distinct sense that Nojiri has bitten
off more than the game engine can chew, resulting in
framerate lurches and the AI bungling around, chasing
its own tail. Bugs are a frequent nuisance, too, with
some dodgv collision detection that can partly be
attributed to the sheer amount of onscreen activity. The
action includes not just foes, but environments that can
be blown to bits by your attacks, sending walls, pillars
and all sorts of detailed debris crumbling onto enemies.
It's often all too much to take in, and the AI's tendencv
to smash up the place (intentionally or not) can lead to
some frustratingly chaotic battles.

Then there's the closing act. While it ups the ante
in scale as you battle through a city in ruins towards
an über-demon's lair, it stumbles in its balancing.
Suddenly, NeverDead shifts from casual shooter to
unforgiving taskmaster, asking you to juggle an assault
of all enemy types, a rush of bosses, and, not least of
all, the trick of trving to keep Brvce in one piece.
Despite its flaws, NeverDead keeps vour attention
as the bizarre plot flits between flashbacks to Bryce's
origin and his present-day job as a demon hunter. The
origin strand of NeverDead’s story is more affecting and
well-plotted than you'd expect from a game with such a
schlocky vibe, too. The flashbacks to Bryce's early, pre-
immortality vears reveal a clean-cut hero on a mission
to vanquish the evil demon king Astaroth. Having offed
Bryce’s partner, Astaroth forces our hero to wallow in
mourning for eternity, hence his inability to welcome
death with open arms. It sounds trite, but it resonates
strongly as vou witness present-day Bryce, all snark and
sneer, contrasted with his former valiant, hopeful self.
The otherworldly invaders plaguing the city
inevitably tie the past and present narratives together
and there's a healthy amount of comedy in the script
that's sadly let down by low-brow sexism (reinforced
by a cutscene camera with a penchant for cleavage
and low-angle shots of women's behinds). The overall
tone is somewhere between 2000AD (Rebellion nods to
Judge Dredd through in-game magazines and posters)
and Mike Mignola's Hellboy. Though it never quite
reaches the quality — in script or style — of either,
Nojiri has introduced a grizzled protagonist who
stands out regardless of familiar subject matter.
NeverDead may have issues, then, but it should be
commended for innovating in a genre muddied by
wannabes without the confidence to experiment with
the shooter's ever-cloned DNA. In the end, NeverDead's
heart is in the right place: committed to entertaining
you, no matter the cost — even if it means losing

" ча

Bryce and his minder, Arcadia (left), become tangled up in a demonic plot to kidnap pop star Nikki Summerfield (centre). The starlet's squeamishness is exploited for laughs at every possible turn

ABOVE The designers occasionally

throw in a delightful-looking vista,

but the bulk of the game takes
place in dark and dreary city
interiors. Still, from a mental
asylum to a police station and,
eventually, the big bad demon's
lair, there's variety to NeverDead's
take on the world. Though there
are missteps, such as a blackout
in the sewers, the game has a
cohesive look, falling between
Gothic fantasy and reality.
RIGHT Once you've been
munched on by one of the
colourful, enthusiastic monsters,
it's time to scramble back to
safety and attempt to reattach
those limbs. Rolling around the
area while legless and firing off
rounds is a deranged and often
unsettling activity that's unlike
anything you've played before

ABOVE The young, clean-cut and intentionally heroic Bryce is a tall measure
of a man. That's especially apparent when contrasted with the haggard,
scarred, cynical and rather sexist Bryce of his five-millennia-old later self

he conventional wisdom is that only games

designed from the ground up for new hardware

make the best use of it. But Kojima Productions’
handheld record is not conventional, and Metal Gear
Solid 3D: Snake Eater is a surprise: apart from
Nintendo’s own Super Mario 3D Land, no other game
does as much with the console’s headline feature.

Among the Metal Gear series, Snake Eater was the
perfect choice: the environments could have been built
for stereoscopic visuals. Its jungle is composed of large
blades of grass, and dotted with trees, rocks and hills.
Interiors are either claustrophobia-inducing corridors
or cavernous hangars zigzagged with walkways, and are
always filled with crates, furniture and guards, which
serve to break up the game's even surfaces.

You'll spend a lot of time in the grass in MGS3D,
peering out at patrolling guards and inching Snake
forward on his belly. There will alwavs be multiple
blades in your field of vision, and the depth of each
small grouping is distinct, creating a convincing effect
with real texture to it. Many 3DS games have visuals
that feel gimmicky and pop out, but here they
reinvigorate a familiar world. Playing in 2D, even
to give your eyes a quick rest, feels like a waste.

The absolute pinnacle of MG53D's use of 3D comes when aiming a

gun in firstperson view while lying in the grass. The illusion of depth
here is so layered that it beats almost everything else on 305 to date

>
=

122

Metal Gear Solid 3D:

Publisher Konami

Developer Kojima Productions
Format 305

Release February 21 (US),
March 8 (JP UK)

JEDY EAD ADES
HUNGRY FOR MORE?

It's a pity MGS3D doesn't offer

more 3DS-specific features. The
gyroscopic controls are used for

balancing, while there's also
the neat option to customise
Snake's camouflage via the
console's cameras. Most
disappointing is the omission
of P52's multiplayer mode,

which would surely have grven

it some online legs. In terms
of content, MG53D isn't the
definitive version of a classic —
that's Subsistence = but по
other version looks like this.

—
*

Snake Eater

The list goes on — judging enemy distance, or the
terrific effects during a late chase sequence — but
suffice it to say MGS3D is a must-have if you want to
show off the 3DS hardware. The game itself is no slouch
either, although after Subsistence, a director's cut
released on PS2 with bags of extras, this feels a little
light when viewed as a package (see ‘Hungry for more?’).

MGS; is Kojima's finest hour. It's a focused but
constantly inventive adventure, and the boss battles in
particular showcase an imagination vou just don't get in
other games. Not one plays out like any of the others,
and they're all magnificent here — barring perhaps The
Fury, which retains its drop in framerate.

The game also offers a brilliant change in stealth.
The natural camouflage of the jungle is a big departure
from earlier games’ boxier labs, enabling Snake to hide
within touching distance of foes before striking. It's
kept fresh with layouts that never repeat, always asking
something new from sneaky minded players. Plus, it
gives raging bulls the Close Quarters Combat system,
and everything from AK47s to silenced sniper rifles.

Packed with detail, both in terms of its
environments and mechanics, this is a game that pays
back investment in spades. MGS3 is a modern classic —
the tightest, smartest and most emotional journey
in the series — and even its HD update doesn't
look as good as this portable treatment. | |

bout year into Kinect's life, there seem to
be two main ways tor development teams to

approach things. The first is to take Microsoft
at its word about the peripheral, delivering complex
games that hinge on one-to-one motion-tracking, while
quietly hoping the technology can keep up. The second
— and much cannier — tactic is to pay attention to the
unspoken rules: to appreciate that Kinect still struggles
to work quickly and accurately, and to then carefully
ensure that it never really has to.

This is the path Haunt follows, taming its design,
reining in any obvious ambitions and offering a gentle
family-friendly ghost tour powered by basic gesture
controls. Take out the ducking and lunging, and it’s a
bare-bones adventure game: the narrative threads its
way past locked doors and broken machinery, while the
spooky mansion you're exploring is essentially a lavish
3D hypertext document. You may jog on the spot to
inch through its rattling hallways, but Haunt is at its
best when you're using your flashlight as a mouse
pointer and clicking between objects, each one requiring
gentle interaction before it gives up its secrets.

It's a design that prioritises basic reliability. Gesture
recognition is loose and forgiving, and it makes no
Some of the ghosts you'll face in Haunt's rickety corridors require a well-

timed scream in order to deal them any damage. Most, however, will
succumb to the odd jab and a couple of blasts from your flashlight

PLAY

Haunt

Publisher Microsoft

Developer NanaOn-5ha, Zoe Mode
Format 360

Release Qut now

FIGHTIMG SPIRIT

During fights, Haunt always
does its best to keep things
moving along, throwing in
punches, dropkicks and
projectile tennis alongside
phantoms that require you to
either cover your eyes or your
ears, or ta fire off coils of
magical paint. The design team
has even clogged the mansion’s
halls with clouds of gas, flocks
of bats and the odd skull-
mounted laser to dive past

It's never entirely convincing,
however, and the game can
often feel busy and muddled
rather than genuinely intricate.

attempt to suggest Kinect's genuinely interpreting
every movement. Instead, each manoeuvre feels like

the empty-handed equivalent of pushing a button —
albeit a button that tends to idle a little before it
triggers anything. When it comes to puzzles, this works
quite well, with animations and aural cues making it
fairly clear whether or not your 360 understands what
you're trying to do. In combat situations, though, the
lag removes almost all of the drama, turning each ghost
encounter into a graceless stumble from one input to
the next. While Haunt is rarely frustrating, it's been
robbed of anv kind of internal rhythm.

Luckily, NanaOn-Sha's latest also comes with a
smart script and a mischievous central performance
from adventure gaming's fairy godfather, Tim Schafer.
Cast as Haunt's spectre-in-chief, he's a charmingly
untrustworthy companion, and his steady chatter of
encouragement does much to prod you through the
game when the interactions have become a slog, and
the miles of identical corridor start to blur together.

Schafer brings a touch of warmth to a game that's
otherwise defined by cold pragmatism — an adventure
too rigorously shaped by the limitations of the device
it's built for. Haunt’s failings aren't hard to understand,
but that doesn't make them any easier to ignore.
In order to ensure Kinect's good behaviour, it
must forever keep you at arm's length.

123

Little Deviants

Publisher SCE
Developer Bigbig
Format Vila
Release Qut now (Japan), February 22 (EU, US)
P ity the little deviants, because they

| appear to have been focus-grouped
into oblivion, all traces of character and
charm smoothed off until what’s left is
a maniacally grinning blob that looks
eerily like the decapitated head of one
of Rayman’s raving rabbids. Still, at least
Bigbig's creations make appropriate
mascots for their parent collection of
minigames, which lacks legs.

Every one of Vita’s litany of control
inputs gets a game of its own, but it's the
gyroscope that comes off best overall,
allowing for responsive, precise handling
in minigames that involve steering your
deviants as they hurtle towards targets
and around obstacles. And while the rear
touchpad is equally reliable, the games
showcasing it are not. One requires you
to deform the landscape by pressing it
from behind, but an isometric camera
angle makes precise control difficult.
Another asks you to pinch, pull and fling
deviants around a wrestling arena — a
request that occasionally showcases the
difficulty of trying to approach the rear
touchpad from the sides of the unit.

There isn’t an awful game on show,
but most are throwaway, and having to
unlock each new example by getting a
bronze rating in the previous challenge
feels like unnecessary work. But Little
Deviants’ real problem is simple: it’s not
moreish, and its challenges fail to reveal
the kinds of nuance on the second and
third tries that will have you refining
strategies and aiming to better scores.
Without that incentive to return, 5
you're unlikely to.

PLAY

Everybody's Golf

Publisher SCE
Developer Clap Hanz
Format Vita
Release Out now (Japan), February 22 (EU, US)

" hose expecting a convincing display

| of Vita's unique features from
Everybody's Golf will be disappointed.
The rear touchpad can be used to
pinpoint the distance of objects on the
map, swipes on the screen rustle like
wind through the trees, and you can take
a firstperson wander around the course,
panning the camera as you go. That's
your lot, and all are as pointless as they
sound. Happilv, the core mechanics are
as digital as ever, the three-press control
system being both precise and rewarding.

Offline, the principal time sink is
Challenge Mode, a series of nine- and
18-hole games with point rewards for
beating unseen CPU opponents. Points
can be spent on costumes, new ball and
club types, concept art, music and
unlockable characters. There's little
incentive to play as the latter, though,
since completing challenges levels up
Lovalty, adding to your stock of power
shots, which give vou an extra ten yards
on the stroke of your choice. As such,
you'll question the value in picking a
new character who can drive a farther 15
vards off the tee, because it feels like a
retrograde step from the one you've been
using since you first loaded up the game.
Unadventurous Everybody's Golf

may be, but it's wonderfully executed,
and its presence at Vita's launch is
welcome. With their endlessly smiling
characters, cheery J-tunes and bright
skies, Everybody's Golf titles are the
best Nintendo-esque games a Sony
console has ever seen, and this

latest iteration is no exception. ЕЯ

Reality Fighters

Publisher SCE

Developer Novarama

Format Vita

Release February 22 (EU), February 23 (Japan), March 13 (U5)
| ovarama, maker of Invizimals,

| continues to spearhead SCE's
augmented-reality charge, and to deliver
games with stale personalities. It's
fortunate, then, that Reality Fighters
encourages you to add your own flavour
to this 2D fighter with 3D character

vour voice to a model may be a simple
gimmick, but doling out punishment to a
recognisable friend has a quirky charm.

As with Invizimals, an AR detection
card can help set up fights wherever vou
are, but there's also the added bonus of
being able to simply point the camera
and watch as fighters are laid down
automatically. It can be inconsistent,
with combatants appearing in unlikely
places, but it's mostly functional and
an encouraging demonstration of the
technology, with fights licking along
smoothly. The irony is that Novarama's
AR innovation is also the game's biggest
flaw: as the camera jiggles around, it can
seriously interfere with the solid (if
derivative) combat. The developer has
borrowed its core fighting from the best,
namely Capcom's 2D beat 'em ups, but it
lacks the aesthetic appeal to elevate it
from robustly enjoyable to dazzling.

As a proof of concept, Reality Fighters
is convincing, but it’s sub-par as a
high-priced fighting game, trailing the
competition and offering novelty in place
of substance. Augmented reality on Vita
has been proven as a viable tool, so now
it just needs to be applied to a more
suitable genre than the 2D fighter n
to truly exploit its potential.

124

learn / network / inspire
52012

www.BDCONF.cow

SAN FRANCISCO, CA
MARCH 5-8, 2012
EXPO DATES: MARCH 7-9

i
UBM

StoreMa

create

Lifting the lid on the art, science,
and business of making games

gs com

This issue's People, Places, Things gets straight to the point (and click) on
0128, with Broken Sword legend Charles Cecil & talking about the li.
soldier who almost curtailed his ambitions, and the adventures that followed, ERAT MEUM
including those he's in the process of making. While brooding over his tale,
we stumble upon the Gothic labyrinth that is Dracula's Castle on p130

É and chart the evolution of this ever-changing abomination unto man.

Another aspect of gaming that's seen multiple manifestations is the save point
ж ‚ a short history of which you'll find recorded on p132. Then for our
Studio Profile Se on p134, we talk to Arkedo about pulling things back

from the brink of oblivion at the last moment. On the topic of commercial

on 9138 for a

concerns, we join Ninja Theory in The Making Of...
retrospective retread of the paths it forged when crafting the wellreviewed
Enslaved: Odyssey To The West, and discuss how it fell off the map when
it came to sales. Concluding this issue's Create are our regular columnists,
with designer Tadhg Kelly © (0142) proposing that games aren't all-
conquering, but a valuable part of the transmedia future, and LucasArts’
Clint Hocking ۶
gaming's portals. Then Tiger Styles Randy Smith

[pl44] opening the door to a discussion about

| 19147 | considers
what it takes to satisfy а more mature breed of A" while writer

James leach @ (0148) opens up his heart and shares on the subject

of caring, and what kind of touches can make gamers invest emotionally.

126 EDGE

Crafting believable
characters is one thing to
strive for, but how vital
is it? On p138 we talk

to Ninja Theory about
why a movie-like level

of investment in story
didn't equal blockbuster
sales for Enslaved

PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

CHARLES CECIL

Adventure game genius, national treasure, international man of mystery

“The story, the location
and the puzzles need to
be interwoven at every
stage, says Cecil. “Come
up with the story first -
then work out how the
narrative can be moulded
to work as а дате”

is EDGE

Storemags

f hen Charles Cecil wos 18

_ months old, a Congolese soldier
pointed а gun at his head and,
for а few terrible seconds, looked
certain to pull the trigger. A year before, his father
had taken a job in the newly independent
Republic of Congo overseeing the local office

of a multinational company. Back then, it looked
like the beginning of an exciting new life, but
revolution was brewing and white expatriates
were beginning to bear the brunt of anti-European
fervour, Cecil, throwing stones from his backyard
one morning, had cought the soldier on the leg
as he passed. If it hadn't been for the frantic
remonstrations of the family’s gardener, he may
have paid with his life.

Cecil's heavily pregnant mother Hed the
country with her son — а gruelling journey
involving river boats and tiny mail planes, which
last year was recounted in her fascinating memoir,
Drums On The Night Air. Alter recuperating in
Britain, the family moved to Nigeria for a while,
before settling back in the UK. All
this before Cecil was ten.

It's unsurprising then, that,
on becoming a game designer,
he would choose to create
adventures. In the famed Broken
Sword series, hero George
Stobbart travels the world getting
into desperate scrapes with exotic
enemies and enigmatic secret
societies. Surely this must have come from Cecil's
formative experiences in Africa? He laughs when
we put forward the theory. “It would be lovely to
think that wouldn't 12° he says. “But yes, l'm sure
some of that time affected me, and may well have
given me that love of telling adventure stories.

“One of the most vivid memories | have
is of going to Paris in the late ‘60s, when | was
seven or eight,” he recalls. “We stayed with my
uncle, а Portuguese communist who'd fought
against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and was
such a romantic hero. And what was lovely were
the smells of Paris, the Gitanes [cigarettes] and
the way people walked differently. One of the
important things about writing engaging games
is to avoid cliché — draw on the poignancy of real
experiences. The reason Paris figures so heavily
in the Broken Sword games is because of those
days, staying with my uncle and listening to his
astonishing stories.”

lt was in the early '805 that Cecil first
discovered technology. WVhile attending Bedoles
School in Hampshire, he took an interest in

“An important
thing about writing
engaging games
is to avoid cliché

— draw on real
experiences”

mechanical engineering and later spent а year
working for Ford on an industrial sponsorship.
There he met Richard Turner, а fellow geek who
had just disassembled the ROM of the ZX8 | and
written а book about it. Turner also owned а
TRS-80 and, having played all of Scott Adams’
text-based adventure games on it, set up his own
software label, Artic Computing, to begin coding
similar titles for Sinclair's range of computers.
Cecil agreed to help, writing textonly titles like
Inca Curse, Ship Of Doom and Espionage Island.
After Artic, Cecil spent two years as a
development manager at US Gold and then at
Activision, before getting into creating adventure
games again. This time, he set up Revolution
Software with three partners, Топу Warriner, Dave
Sykes and Noirin Carmody. The first game was
Ihe ingenious Lure Of The Temptress, an Arthurian
adventure, following a peasant boy named
Diermot as he sets out to rid his kingdom of an evil
sorceress. The game used a mechanic that Cecil
refered to as ‘virtual theatre’, in which NPCs
were able to freely wander the
whole world, communicating with
each other and interacting with
objects, rather than taking up the
usual static positions. | had
something else central to the
success of Revolution’s titles: wit.

The company’s next iile,
Beneath A Steel Sky, took a new
direction. While working at Activision, Cecil had
contacted comic-book artist Dave Gibbons about
licensing Watchmen as a video game. The two
stayed in touch and when Revolution was set up,
Gibbons and Cecil started discussing game
concepts. "He got involved very early and brought
his own ideas," says Cecil. "Не hand-drew the
backgrounds, then they were painted and
scanned in. He was hugely influential." The result
was a darker, cyberpunktheme romp with Kafka:
esque undertones, but again, an everyman hero
and a clever sense of humour kept the tone light.
From then, it's really all been about Broken
Sword, the adventure series that explored ideas of
lemplar conspiracies years before the Dan Brown
novels [it was inspired by the Umberto Eco novel
Foucault's Pendulum]. There have been four
instalments, as well as director's cut editions for
Wii, DS and smartphones, and the popularity is
still there — the iPhone editions of Broken Sword |
and /! have seen over five million downloads.
Cecil puts the success down to a sel of simple
structural archetypes he's always followed.

URL www. revolufion.co.uk

Inca Curse, Ship
OF Doom, Espionage Island, lure Of The
lemptress, Beneath A Steal Sky, Broken Sword,
Broken Sword Il: The Smoking Mirror, In Cold
Blood, Gold and Glory: The Road To El
Dorado, Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon,
Broken Sword: The Angel Of Death
Current project ТВС

"The story, the location and the puzzles need
io be interwoven together at every stage,” he
says. “You come up with the story first, of course
- the locations, the characters — but then you work
out how the narrative can be moulded at the very
highest level to work in terms of a game."

It looks as though this will be a busy year for
Revolution, which remains а four-person company,
with a network of freelancers — a very madern
setup. Although Cecil won't confirm it, the
company is believed to be working on a new
Broken Sword lor iOS and maybe PSN and XBLA.
"We're totally embracing HD technology," he
says. "In terms of gameploy it's innovation rather
than revolution. A lot of gamers felt the original
bits in Broken Sword: Directors Cut were quite
old-fashioned and preferred the new sections,
but we don't want lo alienate our original fans.
We want the games to feel contemporary, lively,
bul they will be unabashedly 2D. And our new
game is looking absolutely fantastic."

And it's not the only project he has in mind.
"Dave Gibbons and | keep talking abou! writing
another adventure together and we have a design
that's quite well advanced," he reveals. “It's a
sciencefiction adventure, bul very much drawing
on the idea of interactive comic books and how
gameplay can be moulded towards a more
dynamic visual style. We keep starting il and then
something else overtakes us. We'll do it... one
day... soon..."

Awarded an OBE last year, and having spent
time helping to craft the BBC's Dr Who Adventure
tiles, Cecil has also become more than another
veteran British game designer — something akin
to a national treasure. Gaming owes a lot to a
gardener іп leopoldville, Congo, who in the early
'60s confronted a soldier to protect a litle boy
and the vast adventure that lay ahead of him. I

129

CREATE
PEOPLE, PLACES, THINGS

OCES

DRACULA’S CASTLE

Konami's evolving quest to create the ultimate Gothic fortress

Castlevania 5 associated

with 12th-century Gothic
architecture, but the LOS
team was equally inspired
by earlier European work,
especially from France and
Spain in the 11th century

here's a classic moment in Bram Stoker's
Dracula where a solicitor named Jonathan
Harker climbs down from a carriage in the
Carpathian Mountains and beholds “a vast
ruined castle, from whose tall black windows
came no ray of light, and whose broken
botlements showed с jagged line against the
sky". This portentous arrival should give a familiar
chill to fans of Konami's Castlevania games, since
they often deposit the player belore a daunting
gate, beyond which sinister spires rise up against
the moon. The franchise permits itself generous

liberties with its source material, filling it with perky

young anime characters and Universal Horror
monsters, but the castle's foreboding sentience is
a constant, even as protagonists, terrains and
gameplay mechanics vary around it.

While the heroic Belmont clan and its proxies
have traversed a variety of fortresses during their
quarter-century of adventuring, these structures
have all been unified in their expression of a
castle's qualities. The game's fiction even suggests

such permutations of Dracula's Castle are driven
by its supernatural aura, and so they are all in
fact the same spookily morphing fortress.

At first, the concept was mostly a cosmetic
one. A Саѕћеуопіа castle contained hearthelding
candelabras and breakable walls, blood-red
curtains and elegant chandeliers, libraries and
clock towers - all manner of Gothic window
dressing for crisscrossing webs of corridors, stairs,
and platforms. But as the series evolved into the
more open action/ RPG template, this visual theme
took on a metaphysical dimension.

Beginning with Symphony Of The Night
a castle was much more than just candles and
stones. || was a vast maze that embodied an
esoteric view of the individual's journey through
consciousness. While many would tread the main
paths, only a few adepts would ascend to the
highest tiers of completion percentage. And, as

in the novel House Of leaves, a castle was
somehow bigger on the inside than the outside.
Intestinally wending passageways rendered small
rooms immense, and hidden realms lurked beyond

the visible edges ot the map, tugging the remote
limits towards infinity. A castle was a microcosm
the world in a box. By Portrait OF Ruin, this

П
f
li
|

abstraction was entrenched enough that players
could visit deserts and towns without feeling as
though they had escaped the castle's walls.

Ihe concept, however, developed on a Но
plane, and this has thwarted most galleifilg!ssdo..
modernise Castlevania with 3D game dla; ine

Por vet в

From Castlevania series
Developer Konami
Origin Japon

Debut 1984

One Castlevania hallmark is inch-by-inch map revelation, which XBLA's Harmony Of Dissonance did away with by letting the
player pull back the camera and see the whole map. Dracula's Castle seems less mysterious when it looks like Elevator Action

introduction of the Z axis usually upsets the
delicate systems balanced along the X and Y. But
with 20105 Lords Of Shadow, MercurySteam
figured out how to make a modern God Of War
style action game really feel like Castlevania. The
company did it by learning from both positive and
negative examples of the franchise's history, with
a keen eye Юг the most essential icons and
mechanics from the 2D classics.
“The knowledge that the past
3D Castlevania titles hadn't
worked wos always present,
says Konami's Dave Cox, the
producer of Lords Of Shadow.
"One reason we were selected to
produce the game was that we
had recognisably ‘Castlevania’
elements working in our 3D
engine, and we were able to

demonstrate an aesthetic design that captured the
atmosphere the series was famous for, What is
interesting is that we were able to look at specific
levels, like the gardens from the N64 title, and
creale a slage that mimicked them, but took it to
a whole new level by using the technology we
had to play with. It did, however, make us мегу
conscious thot every camera, every stage, had

to be absolutely perfect in order to avoid
unfavourable comparisons.”

Lords Of Shadow blends Gothic and 1 Tih
century European architecture into a fantasy world
evocative of the films of Guillermo Del Toro. The
vggechyi skas, snow wo s'assandıusiuswamps

i at уо i bêle, lear ano dime tough on the

There are many
secrets to exhume
and multiple paths
in each level. All
inexorably lead to
the ultimate castle

way fo the ultimate castle were inspired by
landscape images from Spain and France. “In
studying the classics," says Cox, “we quickly
realised we could create a world rather than just
a castle, because even in ће ВЫ! landscapes
there were mountains, forests, and lakes. But there
are а lot of nods to the series in terms of level
design — the clock tower, for instance — and we
would have been mad to ignore them."

At the same time. the team
jettisoned more cartoonish aspects
that wouldn't have translated well
into а more realistic setting. "The
hearts had to go," says Cox, “but
the general layout and candlelii
element reinforced lords Of
Shadows link to the pasi and
added to its overall Gothic look.”

More importantly, Cox's team
found ways to integrate the backtracking that
defines the series. The game is split into levels via
а map screen, which seems blasphemous at first
But the necessity of revisiting prior levels with new
abilities remains, so that the player's progress is
not linear but circular — a widening gyre. There
are many secrets to exhume from nooks and
crannies, and multiple paths in each level. All
inexorably lead to the ultimate castle, which has
much more gravity than the game's bête noire,
Dracula. “The castle was viewed as a specific
character in many respects," says Cox. "That
was one of the reasons we wanted the player
to take some time to get there, so it felt like
meeting an important person within the story. №

13]

132

PEOPLE PACES THINGS

SAVE POINTS

Why an immersion-breaking necessity can also be a crucial piece of design

ee ses.

МН, ЖАН. ЯНК МАЙК. ШШК АНН. ARR SI €)

"rr (tt

eerie cube?”

L o : * Ф > x E o >

i Fs 1

^ ^s
|

= f. سے‎ a CALI
ÉL LL — ШЕЕ

Resident Evil's limited-use
typewriters are rare

examples of save $60326 71%
that are fully integrated? Interview
into a game's тесте videos

ave points are easy to resent. They are,
-after all, harbingers of ingame admin.
Whereas books can be picked up where
you left off with minimal fuss, and films
and TV shows can be consumed in a sitting, save
points demand that the working-day language of
dota storage intrudes upon your relaxation time.
You don't ‘play’ a save point: it's a practicality, a
momentary disruption of a games flow to ensure
that time isn't wasted and progress is retained.

At least that's true for many save points, but
some are harder to separate from the fabric of
their hast games. Save point frequency can make
the difference between а hard game and an easy
one, and it can be responsible for momentary
difficulty spikes in otherwise straightforward
games, too. Push deep into uncharted parts of
Metroid Prime with Samus's missile supply near
empty and her health running low, and the
euphoric relief of stumbling into an energy and
ammo-testoring save station can be overwhelming.

Of course, Samus isn't saving, bul performing
an act of data backup, or some other in-universe
excuse for her actions. Nothing can puncture
carefully honed fiction and remind you that you're
playing a game like a save point, so they rarely
appear without the fig leaf of a contextual
explanation to hide their true role.

And fittingly, considering they're gaming's
bookmarks, that explanation will often involve
writing. A day in Harvest Moon
isn't complete — or, for that matter,
permanent — until recorded in your
characters diary; save in Final
Fantasy IX, and the moogle that
you're talking to will whip out a
giant, leather-bound tome and
quill pen. It may not be a direct
analogue for the action you're
really performing, but the motif
works. Ink drying on paper communicates a
shift from the ephemeral to the enduring.

lt was also the metaphor behind Resident Evil's
typewriters. These clacking antiques — themselves
а neat capturing of the Spencer Mansion's eerie
outoHime quality = are a set of save points
audaciously integrated into the game's survival
themes. Early Resident Evil was about hoarding
supplies — herbs, ammo and weapons — but, most
daring of all, it also required players to hoard
saves in the form of ink ribbons, one of which
was used up every lime they saved their game.

Ribbons weren't especially rare, but they didn't
have to be. Their very presence undercut players'
confidence in the wisdom of saving, while letting

Nothing can
puncture crafted
fiction and remind
you that you're
playing a game
like a save point

them do so almost whenever they wished. It was
a perfect solution to the problem of players
recording every minor piece of progress and
reloading their game when a panicky trigger
finger saw them fire their last shotgun rounds into
а wall. In any other context, the system would be
unfair, But this was survival horror, and Capcom
understood that while it couldn't directly threaten
players’ lives, it could torment them with the
possibility of wasting time.

As the series has become more
actionfocused, the need for such о
system has lessened. Resident Evil
4 offered typewriters with infinite
ink, whereas 5 didn't feature them
at all. But Resident Evil wasn't the
last time zombies would inspire an
inventive save system in a Capcom
game. Dead Rising might have
been a more relaxed brand of survival horror, but
it was still its save points that provided a faint
background hint of constant threat. What better
representation of savings role as an inconvenient
necessity could there be than Frank West needing
to visit the bathroom to record his progress? It
might lack the symbolism of paper and ink, but it
certainly makes more sense as an urgent detour
than Chris Redfield's repeated desire to jot things
down. Ne More Heroes would take the joke
further by letting you watch Travis Touchdown
drop his trousers while you saved the game, but it
was the mechanics behind Dead is o save

system thal made it stands |
slot, and а story syst „io sei

inm

Dead Risings tollet: based saves are раша а around its Willamette mall setting. Getting to them is the т-а рагї

windows open and close regardless of whether
you were in position to activate them, Dead Rising
managed to be less stringent than Resident Evil's
rationed ribbons while retaining the potential for
players to scupper their progress. Only this time it
wasn't game time they were in danger of losing,
but the ability to advance their game.

Save points are archaic. The generation that
grew up with them can no longer afford to have
software dictate the form of its free time. What
quicksaves started, autosaves and checkpoints
finished. Games that can't be picked up from
where you left off are the exception now, not the
rule. But the spectre of the save point still haunts
even those games that have managed to turn
autosaving into a rod with which to beat players'
backs. Barely an action goes by in Dark Souls
without an autosave committing it to memory; yet
far from lessening the tension, the seriousness of
permanence underscores every mistake ingame.
But, as Dark Souls players will attest, there's
nothing quite as special as stumbling across a
complire for the first time. These glowing beacons
aren't save points in the traditional sense, but they
are their descendants, functioning as health
restorers, restart points, and level-up stations.
Dark Souls’ save system ensures you can't forget
your failures, but stumbling across one of these
lodestars in the dark enables you to cement your
victories. In an era when the save point feels
Ki old-fashioned, it's a powerful reminder
| ap agesi andachievemen!
7 O offer. №

133

CREATE
INSIDER

STUDIO PROFILE

Arkedo Studio

Six years ago, a French studio set out to make
‘bright yellow games’. Here's how it's done so far

O Pixel the cat is the
eponymous star of Arkedo's
third Xbox Live Indie Game,
Pixel!, a scrolling platformer
with a luminous art style.

© Arkedo's art, such as that
in Big Bang Mini, channels a
mixture of cute fantasy and
retro detailing — the same
kind of blend you often see

in the vinyl toy market.

a sense of character without
sacrificing readability.

games — such as
1 б р x" pt ET I Е NT ree >
1 = &. 5 n" Р
04 (= i ү | | | |
: | m Tr d > "^ |
* t * 3

134 —— EDGE

isten to Camille № Guermonprez for long
enough and y you may end up decidir ng that
a goo 5d indie a veloper r needs the pluck
resilience and im practically optimistic бойго
ol a Warner Bros cartoon characte:
Guermonprez is ће co founder ol Paris based
Arkedo Studio and, as he tells it, his company's
history is one ot i ingenuity and disaster: a Cycle

composed of astonishing successes sand terrible,

impossible failures. People have flung bags of
money ar Arkedo, bul they Ve also Hun Ч ri ү! ing
pans. Back in late 2010,

situation wos so bad that,

ton example Ihe

a
even as (suermon prez
packe c Jp a demo of his team's latest work and
took it to С

il lo publishers,

Game Connection Lyon in order to pitch
he was ready lo declare his

Wy al г]. FEW ты Cor Lia
"It was the last fireworks | ;

"Quir last Fireworks while the boat

-—— any dead
he | augh: EP

was sinki ng: pi iton bri С! nt clo ylhes. a smile and

clean teeth. Wete a bit of a romantic Firm here.

if vou re going to die. lets do it in sl Ме.

wos

prepared for that.’
Guermonprez cofounded the studio along

with artist and designer Aurélien Regard in 2006

forced out of his last co трапу,

alter he had been
a developer ot mobile Games. "That team grew lo
be about 60 or 7O people throughout the course

= jf и
of 115 life,

raised some VC

HP TT. Р a ate a اسي‎ “| ei А
метте геп embers, | 3 upidly

money around vedr three сї four,
and when | manai дес to do that.
the Quy who pul ihe money in took
extra care to fire me within a few
months. Then ney fired the quy

who tired me, and then they

to fire."

-ouldn't tind a third guy

Gostimnpas Á hod Shores

in Ihe deve oper ‚and cashed

А N г 7 Р Ei | Г u^ f^^
out with around £ 300,000

fe 2 = р : à | :

| would have been eno Jan to
De , = ii р _ i | | " |
cover his old company's payroll tor just 17 days;
he founded Arkedo determined that it would fund

- ЕЗ = ты ат, = = жь н А fm. А * - у”
a new team of three for over a year, V Ме wanted

lo make real COMES by OUISE IVES, OOMES hal

ame ina b MOX and Wwe wanted lo spend

Ó months doing ! he says. | hal was a ver y

sSIronga drive. | think у Ca need E OFT pes kind ol f failure
in ordern ta pi ut * МС urself “м word 3
were hwo

in Lr both

i |
| CK y

Al the heart of ГА Studios

sacred principles: SIQy small and ек

5 mr xe L -Oncepis that can be enormous

lo Sul ol f "Stay nnt d small wOs есу Decause

ot what | did before." laughs Gus жаи
"| had started small and then followed the
accepted course of c ompanies: if

you're successtul, you should be bigger, We

Classic.

Arkedo Studios

has two sacred
principles: stay
small and retain
IP — simple but

enormously tricky

оооозэв #46 ·

Агкейо 5 Big Bang Mini followed debut game Nervous
Brickdown, helping to establish the studio's vivid identity

ig = "M = ла 5 {з Sy qus Г E E. gi. „гь. i i P, a Ж
hired a lot and raised mor ey: | lived Ihrough
moderate success and hated it

TL E M рч ur i IR. TERME : | | £ =
hal said, Arkedos small size would not be

possible without Aurélien. He's foamy | Е

many pX arts in ihe bana. Не’ y ра iner þer
а gro onic designer, he was dg ено until а
how monlhs ogo, hes the game

a ESICner, and

designer and leve
he keeps everyone happy and
smilin 9. It you have someone

like that I a) VO

r cune Кє Т
у и Sic A Ta ag Шы f tJ vd

responsibility lo provide the means

or him. I'm funding the thing that

he can do, that's how | see that."
And as for retaining IP?

"| made sure that it was not a

on that шыш | be allowed io be asked,”

"With our first two

lo od see publishers once

CEO tor six years

even if | was a bad one, so | can talk business

a little. |

Li id 59 у.

quest

games, | took care

I
Ine ¢ qame WES done WS C

evel people

wanted io meet the higher-

This is a distribution deal. There's no
risk — what YOU 566 15 what you gel Its good
lo say, especially ly when us French Quys are very
famous for over-promising and underdelivering
and having very big mouths, This was my way
of saying, ‘I'm French, but listen anyway The
game is done!”

For Guermonprez, holding on to IP is сбои

"It comes down to this: if

our games are bad, we want it to be

more tran just money.

‚ our fault

Founded 2006
Employees 10
Key staff N пе des jermonprez
lcofounder xad of studio)
Aurelien od б

lar! and g lesicn]
URL www.arkeda.com

Selected softography

Nervous Brickdown, Big Bang

n sg

| РЧР m, A mem um
van), ГК ЕТС Its

Current project Proiect Hal Yeon

and n С bec USE someone a sked O0 da а
zombie survival element Ot whatever, у he > argues
"What we're selling is being different. \With

А! ked о | 5c) y we ге small a nd We nave OUT Own

г — lets say bright yellow, You can be big

and meioo, but you can | be small and metoo.,
When you re talking w th publishers, there are so
opinions lying around, it's like

many everyone

A IE, ap = ——
our. When you have

vul à |
comes in wil their Own C

loo many colours tox gether, you get brown. Brown

and small is not possible. Ninety-nine per cent ol
people hate bright yellow, but we're going to
make br ig nt yellow games [см Ihe t Г WI ight y yellow
crowd, Small games break even quickly. It works,
and it doesn't work il everyone else adds a bil
of their opinion.
Arkedo's micro-studio setup is fairly common

| 2012, but back in 2006 it didn't seem entirely
sane. Nobody else in France was following
Guermonprez’s model, and Arkedo even had to
to Nintendo on its behall

to make DS

since only studios with deals in place

vere allowed access to devkits.

The studio was founded to make a single
ae a fresh twist on Breakout called Nervous
"But since that ı game did OK on DS,
| ma подес io ger my investment back and so we

ii ы ү" +
it into а new чате, sOYS онерге Big

pul
Ba

ing Mini was another DS title, a lavishly pretty

and inventive arcade-style shooter that went on
to make even more money than Brickdown. It
helped ¢ define the team as a ы, outfit with
а penchant for richly coloured artwork and a
nach tor taking very simple arcade mechanics
and reworking them in interesting ways. Sika

reinvested all its money once again. But its next e

135

n aground when {һе publish el attached

project
mysterio usly stoppe agl paying the studio.

In debt and with the DS market ravaged by
piracy, Arkedo turned to Xbox Live Indie Games
hoping to secure a new contract while also
learning how fo work on bigger screens. [he

Arkedo Series brought the studios design, wit and

sophisticated use of colour to Microsoft's platform,
and the team ended up making a launch game
tor Windows Phone 7 off the back of their
success. Another unannounced project ran
aground because of yet more troubles with
publishers, however, and, by the middle of
2010, the studio was on the brink of closure.

"| was prepared psychologically to repay
pretty large debts: about two-thirds of my salary
says Guermonprez.

dead,

it was all over. That wos if =

for the next 20 years,”
"| wos done, we were
we ployed and we lost

"We tried a little last thing,
though: let's give ourselves four
months, and we'll get the whole
eam and make Oul dream дате
and see what happens. If nobody's
interested, then we can say, ‘OK
we ге по! relevant. I's OK to die
in Ihat situation.

Arkedo's ‘final’ project also turned out to be
ils most ambitious. Currently codenamed Project
Hell Yeahl, it's а dizz ying blend of playstyles
wrapped up wilh an ап style inol Guermonprez
describes as “gore-cute”. It features the same
boudoir mix of deep reds and pinks and purples
seen in Ihe likes of Big Bang Mini, but they're
sprayed over a cast of drooling, many-uddered
freaks, ready to haemorrhage blood and gristle.

Guermonprez: “It's interesting in terms of
creativity. Sometimes frustration can be pretty
cool. We put in that game all our frustrations,
all the things we'd been through over the las!
two years. It was so much that it was Bum
Weve spent the last few months just Fe.

136

“It's very romantic.
Even when life hits
you hard, you can
still come back and
make something

of yourself”

SCONE
00 000

ООО

Hell Yeah! to Game Connection, expecting the
worst, "Within two meetings | knew my life had
changed again," laughs Guermonprez. "| knew

| would not spend the next 20 years packaging
yagurts Io repay my debts. In a few meetings,
we knew we had something potentially good."

Arkedo signed with Sega. “They were the

oublisher that reacted most positively to it, and
they put a hefty premium on the price | asked for
All my debts were immediately covered. That was
the best day. It looks like a story you'd tell indie
guys before you pul them to sleep, but it actually
happened. They gave us enough money to make
the game the best we can. We're keeping the IP,
Ihey send us arcade games, they cheer us up,
and they let us make our game. Г

Sega also suggested tha:
the team develop Project Hell
Yeah! for multiple platforms.
Whether Guermonprez liked it or

not, in other words, Arkedo wou
have to get bigger. It's been
growing for the past year. “We
were three for Nervous Brickdown,
four for Big Bang Mini, and six
by the start of Project Hell Yeah!"
Guermonprez calculates. The studio's currently
hovering around the ten-person mark as it works
on two versions of its upcoming game, while
Pasta Games – ће 12-man outfit with which
Arkedo shares an office — handles another.
some things haven't changed, however:
Arkedo's retained its signature graphical style,
and its IP too
printing house in Denfert-Rochereau.

. It also still works out of an old
" Arkedo for
те is part of the community of where | live,"

Guermonprez explains. “I've lived in the same

Масе in Paris for 20 years now. I'm very into food
and | know all the chefs. You get to know the
whole neighbourhood. | had dreamt of working in
this building, and one day the landlord said yes
here was a sense ol belonging to this place,

mak ng, йд! and being ambassadors for the

У We want to be: nice people, polite."

Arkedo's work on the Xbox Live Indie Games service for its Arkedo Series set an early
standard for the platform that most other games have since failed to match. The studio even
received a contract to make a Windows Phone 7 title off the back of games such as Pixel!

Among the usual workstations and cables
Arkedos studio also has a 45-year-old olive t ee

Ihat was installed after Pasta Games' Fabien
Delpiano admitted he had always wanted to work
underneath one. [Gu uermonprez: “|! was something
that he never thought would happen, so | brought
him this huge tree and there was much rejoicing. "|
The office also boasts a professional-grade kitchen
the heart of whal

С кеа away in d согпег,

Guermonprez calls his “secret restaurant’.

"When | set up > Arkedo, |

| wanted fo open another studio, or a restaurant,"

| was wondering whelher
Lun.

he admits. “My wife told me: "Мо way = you will
be drunk at 7am eve y day’. Thal's true, act ually -
| would have a tendency to stay late and come
back a little bit drunk. So I decided | to go halfway
and have a bit of a restaurant
"We have people here from many different

regions of France and they have become a little
bit aware of the cool [food] they have in their
hometown, and Ihey bring it and we eat it

It's а weird combination of food and gaming

and friends. It should not happen, but it does.

We E pul in OUI Doi iher plate ort m beginni ng

vith lindas

that we want to co

ond good food. and wind n Ihis plan Seems
to work pretty well."

Yet times have finally caught up with the
Arkecdo vision: ris. France and the rest of Europe
Arkedo vision: Paris, France and Il Г Europ
ore "omg to fill up with micro-studios turning oul
е projects for iOS or other download
wir Wilh Project Hell Yeah! . Guermonprez

admits: “Wve have run into our general level of

Incompetence. It won't show, but we have gone
through major growing pgins.” Arkedos next
vill be smaller and he may split the
"We'll make

competilion between leam blue and team yellow

project м
studio into two teams to work on it

and make a tem or | l-month project."

"In the end, its been very romantic," he
concludes. "Even when lile aives you very hard
hits. YOu have friends and you can still come back
and make something of yourself. Yes, there are
high risks апа everything, but if it works oul, this

15 ihe mos! rewarding lite you can get. "М

Denis Bourdain

Camille
Guermonprez

ui Ы, 1?
| ec ega

vermon ри jli kea
miomern:im | ДЕТ USL Wy

Have you given much though to what you're
doing after Project Hell Yeah!?
Alongside A ken | м |

i | E „ Fa s i Е
ГИТИН Ч publisher i
i "Ii |

| CR gp i eme I * FE)

Ina Yuvs. | wont t

| РА ne genius е
E Sie inci УГ # і. 5 і

Tha Ja ill be 1 1 j Die i

e moni ем, | hen р

| en you're doing the game
к le аа СУ her ||
i i ту i in 6D da
| {Тө hi Г еа „
à évervbody kesos й Th I thing
| | ught a huge h 0 1
| | б Haj j dea
i ۴ e| i , | П
i j i j wika fe | |

Are you talking about creating а framework
for creativity?

Well we сап help with the code thing

Do you have a name for this publisher yet,
or has it not progressed that far?
Yes. Just to give you а clue to the kind ot thing

bi | TO the ре pie and is sometrnin gJ | mMm reay
| xl г - word n

Do you think it will clash at all with your
current working relationships?
Segas aware ot it, and they're quite interested

я à Ще „= = = ot ^ = mı d og‏ س وس
actually. №5 a bit of a scout job. Sega knows‏
г" Ї| F F rere Merz |e ] „+ f F "n F‏
ri 1 1 Lan Hg! Inc Ч L‏
Ё P yg‏ |
lud tuchos that are n han 50‏ |

5 | ды! 1 rk t
"NL LLLI ah и
r " Son rri "Lut

ind then m noe

LP | г
wbisn il on our
+ T

help get the prototype done
show it Io big publishers or |

a liem Raicu Ё lec! =
аи " та и FL lur bz Y Е

Arkedo's probably the only game studio with its
ould own olive tree. The printing house that the team
calls home is shared with sister studio Pasta Games

137

CREATE
DEBRIEF

THE MAKING OF...

Enslaved:
Odyssey To The West

Brains and brawn, gaming and cinema, ambition and failure: we chart
Ninja Theory's epic attempt to make us care about game characters

oral quardians often warn of the
effects games can have on players,
but what about the people who
make them? If you're а programmer
on СТАМ, do you yearn to batter people with
baseball bats? If you work at Infinity Ward, do
you itch to bunny hop everywhere?

Well, if you'd visited Ninja Theory's offices
in Cambridge during the making of Enslaved in
2009, you'd have seen buff blokes and barrels
ol whey protein stashed under desks. Enslaved —
with its ripped hero, Monkey — was а game that
encouraged people to become bodybuilders.

“Something detinitely kicked off big time,”
remembers technical art director Stuart Adcock.
"We had people strutting around the office,
looking at [art] reference and then feeling a bit
sheepish that they weren't quite big enough.

The animators themselves were jumping around
pretending to be Monkey, and when they saw
videos of themselves they thought, ‘Hang on,

| look a bit weedy."

Yet the real story behind this game isn't
brawn, but emotions. Games are good о! making
you care about unlikely things, such as collecting
gold coins, but the Ninja Theory team wanted
players to care about something more
sophisticated than that: Enslaved's
characters. “| wanted to see it we
could pull off more sublle character
relationships," says Tameem
Antoniades, Ninja Тһеогу%
creative director. "One of my
favourite games of all time was
Another World on my beloved
Amiga. Another was Ico, which
| later learnt was also inspired by
Another World, | wanted to create something
akin to that experience. An epic, melancholic
adventure where you care aboul a companion
that is not real. Everything else serves that
purpose: the performance-capture technology,
the story, the setting, and the faceless anonymity
of the antagonists.”

Set in a post-apocalyptic future where an
abandoned New York has been reclaimed by
nature, Enslaved was about more than just
thirdperson combat and platforming = it was also
а retelling of ancient Chinese epic Journey То The
West as a scifi adventure that featured killer
mechs and just three human characters. The first
of the latter was Monkey, who underwent a long
and in-depth evolution. Art director Alessandro
Toini storted off with a series of concept sketches
based on Snowflake, a one-ocrkind albino

"Alex brought
precision. Each
line is like a
homing missile
crafted to elicit
specific feeling"

Technical art director Stuart Adcock (left) worked on the
facial solver that brought Monkey to life, while chief of
technology Mike Ball took charge of the Al behind Trip

gorilla which was housed in Barcelona Zoo.
"Monkey was originally more of a beast," he
remembers, "but as the narrative developed we
decided to make him more human."

Bringing humanity to ils characters ended up
being at the centre of Enslaved's entire approach.
lis story is like a three-way buddy movie: in the
opening levels, Monkey and a woman called Trip
escape from a crashing slave ship. Scared of
facing the postapocalyptic wilds of Manhattan
solo, Trip traps Monkey by fitting him with a
telepathic headband that will kill him if she dies.
She needs his brawn if she’s going lo survive the
army of mechs standing between
her and her village. Of course,

Ihe ape man is unimpressed al
finding himself enslaved again.

Trip and Monkey's surprisingly
subtle love/hate tussle would be
more than enough for most games,
but Enslaved goes further by
including Pigsy, a corpulent friend
of Trip's father. Witnessing the
three characters’ relationship is a real treat, as
summed up in an unforgettable scene where Pigsy
quizzes Monkey about Trip and then confesses he
has designs on her, without realising that she can
hear every word they say. The story in this game
is funny, tragic and, most of all, dramatic.

It should be по surprise, then, to learn that
Ninja Theory hired а movie screenwriter to help it
nail Enslaved's emotional arc. Alex Garland, best
known for The Beach, 28 Days later and his work
on this year's Judge Dredd reboot, spent time at
Ninja Theory's offices as the game's co-writer

and helped refine the cinematic approach.

"The ambition that exists in the game was
stated the first time | met Tameem," Garland
remembers. "He told me: '| want to try something
that's pushing forwards on narrative. That's why

$$. сот

Publisher Namco Bandai
Developer IMinja Theory
Format 350, PS3

Origin UK

Release 2010

we've come lo a film writer rather than a games

writer.’ He wanted someone not too versed in the
industry, but he was surprised that the bloke he'd
stumbled across was a fanatical gamer!”

Garland, who had already shopped the
licence for a 28 Days Later game around various
unenthusiastic developers and written the aborted
Halo movie script, proved a brilliant collaborator
for the project. "Alex brought precision," recalls
Antoniades. "Each line he writes is like a homing
missile crafted to elicit specific feeling and
understanding in the audience. He worked with
us for two years with a small, mixed-discipline
group of design, art and audio directors to make
sure Ihe story was being told across all the senses
in culscenes and gameplay."

The writer's approach led to several inspired
sequences, such as Ihe one where Monkey mus!
race Pigsy to the top of a junkyard Titan. The
rivalry built between the characters gave both
Monkey and the player the impetus to succeed —
not for points, but to see Pigsy's reaction.

More central to the storytelling, however, was
Monkey's interaction with Trip. Ninja Theory's
technical team had shelved Heavenly Swords
engine for the ouFoHhe-box multiplatform support
offered by Unreal 3. Yet on top of the difficulties
of working with a new engine, Ihe company was
also taking its first step towards a collaborative Al
system. "Creating Ihe Al for Trip was a big new
challenge for us," says chief of technology Mike
Ball. "It was important to create a character who
felt like she was par! of the action, with her own
set of skills, rather than just being an escort
character. There was a really nice system that
allowed her to interact with items in the
environment, so she'd happily go and wander off
to sit on a wrecked car and admire the view.
Unfortunately, it was a feature we had to turn off
due to a bug in the final master candidate."

Even without the more sophisticated Al,
Enslaved's game design played up Trip's
usefulness. She was the brains to Monkey's
brawn: hacking terminals, upgrading Monkey's
power staff and distracting enemy mechs. It gave
the combat system an added edge. “Enslaved
had a much slower and [more] deliberate pace of
combat than Heavenly Sword,” says Ball, “We
termed it a ‘strategic combat system’, where the
intention was for the player to analyse the scene
ahead to determine how they might utilise the
environment and hence plan a strategy before
rushing in with their fists.”

Together, Trip and Monkey proved more
than ће sum of their parts, with the gameplay ®

139

emphasising the emotional journey they were on
as they learned to complement each other's skills.

The final pillar of the effort to bring Enslavea's
characters to life was in the cast of actors
assembled to play them. Notably, of course,
was Andy Serkis, who is not simply a great actor
in a performance-capture suit, but also a huge
advocate for the technology's potential. Having
first teamed up with Ninja Theory on Heavenly
Sword, Serkis signed on to play Monkey in
Enslaved and act as dramatic co-director during
the performance capture shoot at House Of
Moves in LA. "The thing about Andy is he doesn’t
feel any stigma attached to games," says
Garland. "For many actors, the only way you'd
get them in a game is to throw money at them.”

Joined by US TV actress Lindsey Shaw and
Brit Richard Ridings, the cast worked with
Anloniades to prepare Юг their roles. Actors in
ping-pong-ball-studded suits are always an odd
sight, but Enslaved was even stranger than usual,
because Serkis was preparing lo play lan Dury in
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. "Because lan Dury
was badly crippled on one side, Andy was
running every morning lo lose as much weight as
possible while exercising only one half of his
body," Antoniades recalls. "He had lon Dury's
hairstyle, clothing and speech pattern. Basically,
Andy was now lan Dury playing Monkey.”

Such oddities aside, the actors were more
than just reference points for the animators: they
were integral to raising the emotional stakes. “We
wanted to keep dialogue to an absolute minimum
and understand the characters’ souls through their
eyes, through their expressions, through their
voice," says Antoniades. "It's one of those things
gamers don't believe you need... until you
actually see it; then all of a sudden you remember
those characters, and the story, and the world,

Il transcends being a bit of pop entertainment."

Back in England, Ninja Theory's team worked
with the mocap data to create the cinematics.
Pickups were shot in the conference room on
homemade cameras and some of the newly
beeled-up animators squeezed themselves into
lycra to play Monkey (his ‘distract a mech’
shouting animation was filmed in this way].

At the same time, technical art director
Adcock worked with the proprietary facial solver,
а technological marvel that allowed the animators
io capture the expressions on the actors’ faces.
"What the solver essentially does is sample each
frame from the actor and identify what muscles are
active on that frame,” he explains. “It's not like o
point cloud of data, it’s values of different muscles

140

CREATE
DEBRIEF

Q&A

Alessandro Taini
Visual ont direclor for Fnsleved,
Чите Theory

The game's overgrown
cifies are really erg
быга levels?

| really like the idea of mixing the organic

with the manmade, When thinking about the
environments, one of the first things that we

did was to concept a forest made entirely out

of metal and cables. Your instincts were that it
was something natural, but actually it was mode
from metal, | also think that colour is very
important in expressing emotion, and we
wanted the environments themselves to have

an emotional impact.

What were your main influences?

When | was a child, | loved European comics,
а style which is definitely evident in Enslaved
In particular, | was a big fan of Moebius, [Enki]
Bilal and Juan Giménez. l'm also a big lan of
the work of Hayao Miyazaki. In Enslaved,

| wanted to capture the magic and lighting

of the forest in Princess Mononoke,

How much of an influence was the TV
documentary Life After People?

life Alter People was useful in that it confirmed
what we'd already been planning. We'd been
working on the concept of nature reclaiming the
Earth for quite a while, and when Life Alter
People aired it really backed up what we'd
been thinking. It also gave us a useful point of
reference when il came lo some of the specific
details. For example, it allewed us to locus in
оп how grass would look in our scenario.

in your face. When you've got thal, you can

map it onto other characters: Andy Serkis's facial
expressions onto King Kong, for instance. If each
muscle in the face is like a musical note, we're not
trying to put one music track on another thing and
distort or skew it to fit. Instead, we want to know
what those noles are and read the music. When

we know the music, we can play it on any

instrument. №5 а lot of maths, but also a lot of
artistic contribution as well."

Unfortunately, such contributions were
not destined to reach an enormous audience,

and Fnslaved's disappointing sales performance
slammed the door shut on a planned sequel.

So, what went wrong? Well, one of the key
complaints was that the gameplay, particularly the
platforming, reduced players’ skill requirements to
the bare bones. Many were aggrieved that it was
impossible to fall off a ledge. “No death in

platforming is а step too far [for some players], "
says Antoniades, who remains annoyed by the
game mechanic conservatism. "| didn't want
the platforming to be horribly challenging. The
concept of falling to your death because you
missed a jump isn't fun for me."

Instead, Enslaved's relatively short singleplayer
experience was designed to be finished, not to
frustrate. After all, if you're a studio dedicated to
telling stories, you want players to reach the end.
And, unlike most game stories, Enslaved's
narrative was worth seeing through — not just for
the emotional arc between Trip and Monkey, but
also for an ending that raised questions about
virtual worlds and the morality of enslaving people
for their own good. "There were all kinds of meto-
discussions going on in that game," says Garland.
"The whole game con be seen as a metaphorical
discussion of videogames."

The other issue that hampered the game's
release was its marketing. Ninja Theory had
though! that Namco Bandai = a big corporation,
but a smaller publisher than, say, EA or Activision
— would push the game hard. “For some reason
that | don't really yet understand, it didn't achieve
that attention,” explains Antoniades. "I think the
game could easily have sold more. There was
а lot of promotion in England, and they did а
really good job there, in London in particular,

But outside of there, | don't think many people
have heard of it. | don't think there was virtually
anything in America,"

Enslaved's continuing afterlife, however, is
curious. lis disappointing reception nixed a sequel
and even some of the mooted DLC [Ball says the
ват were close to developing a downloadable
multiplayer online game featuring Monkey's
‘cloud'). However, it received lots of critical
praise and it remains a title that is held up as an
example of effective videogame storytelling.

Last November, Enslaved also picked up a
belated UK Writer's Guild Award for Best Video
Game. Still, Antoniodes remains undecided about
its legacy. "l'm not sure. We wanted to create
affecting characters that felt more like real people
than cardboard cutouts. If the game had been
more successtul, perhaps other games would
follow suit and deem il а worthwhile pursuit. But
perhaps instead it will be held as an example of
why it doesn't matter. Either way, it won't stop us
from trying. | truly believe characters and story can
elevate the gameplay and аНес! people in deep
and satishying ways." If the new-look Dante іп
Ninja Theory's DmC can connect with players
оп a new level, we'll know he's right. №

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happening," says Anloniades. "The problem
vou run into is that we know the game
inadustny really well. We don't know the
movie industry at all. They re used lo a

certain way-ol work ng.and lunding
hove no interest. n working it 3 new vay.”

Enslaved's memorable human characters — Trip, Monkey and Pigsy
(left) — were brought to life via performance-capture shoots held
at the House Of Moves studios (centre), which are based in LA

Trip continues art director
Alessandro Taini's love of
flame-haired heroines:

"When you see a woman
with red hair, the impact is
like a punch. My characters

don't have a Gothic red, it's

more like a Ferrari red"

Monkey's hi-tech ‘cloud was
planned to feature in a now-
abandoned DLC multiplayer mode

TADHG KELLY

loremags com

What Games Are

Ur-media® No, thanks. Transmedia, please

esse Schell writes in The Art Of Game

Design: "All these other types of media

[text, video, pictures, sound and more], and

all media that is to come, are subsets of
games. At their technological limit, games will
subsume all other media." Is a pretty typical view,
especially among folks who describe themselves
as experience — rather than game — designers.

They posit that games are the ur-medium. The
general idea is that because games contain other
media, such as visual art or music, and play is a
more engaging state of mind than watching or
listening, all media will eventually gravitate toward
games. Your story, album, poem and so on will
become a part of a gameworld, as will all others.

Some games already act as sorts of living
galleries. Many have а sense of story and they
con feel alive, like whole other worlds. However,
will they become the one medium to rule them all?
Or does the urmedium idea feel more like a
power fantasy, a diversion from figuring out whal
the art of games actually is?

People who make games rarely consider
themselves as more than service providers or
engineers. They tend to shy away from thinking
in terms of games as culture [never mind art].
Developing a sense of legitimacy in what we
create is a delicate and complicated conversation,
and one way to avoid it is to create goals that are
so impossibly tall, like а cliff stretching up into the
clouds, they can never be attained.

To say that we will be artists when we are the
kings of all arts is а kind of creative cowardice.

IF the cliff is so high that a game designer must be
poel, author, engineer, rule maker and so on
before the vision is made real, then of course
nobody will ever achieve it. Meanwhile, we can
all feel safe in not knowing.

Why do other arts need Io be subsumed
anyway? A game based on The Godfather is
not inherently better than а book or soundtrack
from the same source material. It is fun in some
respects, such as being able to explore the world
and complete missions on your own terms, but it’s
also much more abstract. The play brain [E234]
renders any game down to its frame, so while
The Godfather may spend time storytelling, Ihe
play brain doesn't really care about that.

142

Many games have stories and
feel like whole other worlds.
But will games become the
one medium to rule them all®

There is an obvious difference between
interactive and participant culture. In опе, you
actively do stuff with your hands (ог other body
parts] to cause a meaningful change. In the other,
you watch, read or listen, and perhaps express
your approval or disapproval. What value would
there be in tying all of those things together into
one giant universe that had to be played? When
the interactive is worse than the participatory,
doesn't it just get in the way?

The urmedium idea is actually about justitying
a superiority/interiority complex brought on by
Ihe tendency of some parts of cur culture to look
down on games. Even though a few storied
games sell millions of copies, the wider culture still
lends to regard them as just an impressive thing to

be played rather than a work of great insight, and
experience designers tend to feel that most keenly.

| think they're picking the wrong fight.
Legitimacy comes from within, rather than because
some selFappointed art world pats us on the
head, so the right fight is about how games are
used for adaptation or creation as they are today,
not in some mythical future.

Video didn't actually kill the radio star, film has
nol eaten literature or music, and modern art uses
all sorts of cultural tropes without destroying them.
Each adapts from the other, making good use of
signitiers to convey meaning, but fans can still
enjoy original forms if they choose. If they want to
read Twilight, they read Twilight; they don't have
to play the game to unlock the book.

A better way is transmedia publishing.
Transmedia is clustered rather than hierarchical =
where several items of interrelated media revolve
around a franchise, but none is the definitive
canon. Between them they convey a story, while
permitting more works to evolve over time.

In the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, there are short stories,
novels, a couple of songs by Metallica, a time-
honoured roleplaying game, plush toys, comics,
movies and so on. Cthulhu is transmedia, and the
Mythos allows for change and new ideas without
impacting some overall grand narrative. So
conten! makers are able to have fun with the
material rather than slavishly copying it. INo
subsuming is needed and no far-off technology is
required to make this happen. It already exists
and is one way in which the culture of games
shows itself [Cthulhu Saves The World] today.

Don't we want lo be a part of a creative
community rather than entertaining fantasies about
how we'll show them one day? Isn't it a more
positive future to be a рай of the culture rather
than stand apart from it, waiting for approval?

| think so. As gamers grow up, games are
becoming acclimatised as a рой of wider culture
by default, but there will always be an interest in
watching, reading and listening as well as play.
We don't need to regard these activities as our
enemy, but as our cousins, and we'll all get to
play our part in the transmedia future to come.

Tadhg Kelly has worked in games, from tabletop to consoles,
for nearly 20 years. Visit him at www.whatgamesare.com

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If you were to improve your game development skills, would you take advice from the creators of Doom,
Quake, Rage, Might & Magic, Sword & Sorcery EP Critter Crunch, Bastion, Super Meat Boy, Fez, Chime, and Just Cause 2? Thought so

Nordic Game 2012 presents:

Tim Willits Jonathan Jacques-Belletete
id Software Eidos Montreal

Nathan Vella

Capybara Games

Amir Rao PhilFish SteCurran Emil Persson
Supergiant Games р;

Polytron Secret Crush Avalanche Studios

+ more speakers + live pitching session + business area + network lounge + exhibition floor +
nordic game play area + nordic game awards 2012 + development support grant ceremony +
gala dinner + the renowned nordic party... and don't forget the nordic дате indie night!

Media Partners:

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In The Click Of h

CREATE
INSIGHT

CLINT HOCKING

And in between are the doors...

'ery few people in the real world have
reason to give much thought to doors.
Architects wrangle over their placement,
thieves plot their circumvention,

firefighters consider their role in controlling the
spread of a fire, and the police and army train
around them. Aside from these folks, the rest of the
world pretty much takes doors for granted. Except
for game designers. Game designers have to
view doors through the eyes of architects, thieves,
firefighters, police officers and soldiers all at once,
while simultaneously understanding that players
still expect to take doors for granted.

Some games use doors for gating progression,
introducing waves of enemies or surprising the
player with monsters. Some games require a lot
of tactical decision making around doors, while
others don't have doors at all. Whatever the
design, the impact doors can have on gameplay
and on the underlying structures of the game itself
should no! be underestimated,

The original Doom used doors to gate
progression. Classic ‘red key, red door’ structures
enabled control of the flow and pacing. From the
start of a level you might have been able to see
the shotgun on the pedestal in the lab beyond the
red door, but getting there would typically involve
first getting through the blue door and the yellow
door to get the red key. Once inside, you just
knew all that anticipation was going to be paid
off with something. Would it be the introduction
of a new enemy? A floor that sank into lava? A
bunch of hidden doors opening lo reveal a horde
of lesser monsters? VVhatever it was, it was sure to
be an even match - or at least mostly even — for
your new shotgun. The point is that door design in
Doom was used to reinforce higher level aesthetic
goals such as building anticipation and paying i!
olf, or developing environmental familiarity and
then surprising the player by thwarting it — all
suited to the game's horror theme.

In the case of Skyrim, doors are not part of
gameplay, but are still а critical component of the
game, acting as playeractivated level transitions
Interacting with the door to a new area saves the

Designers have to view doors
through the eyes of architects,
thieves, firefighters, police
officers and soldiers all at once

decide to save land the technical constraints that
underlie those decisions] impacts the experience.
IF the complete Al state or the state of mid-air
missile altacks is not saved, say, players could
theoretically use doors as an exploit. What was
originally ‘the easy solution’ for handling а sudden
transition between two areas, each with hundreds
of megabytes of art assets, can suddenly become
а difficult design problem. How do you handle
the case of a bandit who's set on killing the player
pursuing him through the complete dump and
reinitialisation of the world? Fortunately, Bethesda
was up lo those challenges, but it still took several
games Io imp

ement ils currently robust solutions.
Pegs space uses doors not only in support
Bt Вес goals, but also to dodge some

technical issues. Bulkhead doors in Dead Space
are 'powered' in the games fiction, and from time
to time interacting with a door will lead to a
scripted power failure in the area. As with Doom,
such a failure can poy off builtup anticipation or
thwart expectation with a sudden swarm al
enemies. Additionally, doors in Dead Space seem
to be linked to the streaming engine. No! only can
a scripted failure and ambush give the engine
time to stream in assets for the next location, but
the time even a functioning door takes to open
can be dynamically stretched to accommodate
the streaming in of assets on the other side.

In tactical games, such as Rainbow Six,
Splinter Cell or SWAT, doors are notoriously
complex. In Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory doors
were not only used for level segregation and
streaming, but were also a core ingredient in the
gameplay. The player could open doors normally,
stealthily, or bash them down with force. He could
see under them with his optic cable, or through
them with his thermal vision. Bullets could
penetrate them if the doors were the right material.
They could be unlocked, or locked, or attached
to keypads or retinal scanners, and any of these
locking methods could be circumvented. The Al
could use them, fight through them and around
them, and could even detect if they were left
open, or il the lock had been tampered with.

Games in the Splinter Cell series have always
had a very high interaction density, and because
the gameplay is focused on being in close
proximity to aware enemy agents while your
character is performing complex, subtle and
potentially detectable actions, this degree of
complexity in the door design was appropriate
to support Ihe games' aesthetic goals.

The doors of Splinter Cell, which slow the
pacing tremendously and amplify tension around
them, would be no more appropriate in Doom
than ‘red key, red door’ structures would be in
Sam Fisher's world. The art of game design is not
in seeing features you like in other games and
including them in yours, it's in designing features
to suit the kind of game you are making and the
expenences you want fo encourage.

Clint Hocking is a creative director at LucasArts working on
ап unannounced project. He blogs at www.clicknothing.com

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The Possibility Soace

he older | get, the less games appeal to
me — a sad but common story. Our almost
done VVaking Mars is, among other things,
an attempt to address this: a game
intended to be acceptable to adult tastes. Say
one evening you find yourself in mature grown-up
mode and seeking entertainment. What about a
solid, worthwhile film or novel satisfies you? And if
most games fall correspondingly short, then how?
| love smut, but sadly thats not what | mean
by ‘adult’. Spider skimmed over topics equally
inappropriale lor kids, such as suicide and
alcoholism, but it's not darkness that makes subject
matter mature either, since anything can become
as degenerate os a fart joke if that's your aim.
Sophisticated consumers look for material they
haven't digested dozens of times before: a fresh
premise, or a perspective considered with depth
and insight. So Waking Mars isn't about invading
space fleets, but some of the more enigmatic
aspects of sciti = the unfathomable distances,
durations, and conditions of the Universe, next to
which Earth's entire history is a tiny and familiar
bubble. What would humans learn if we were to
ite beyond our earthly assumptions?
You know when fantasy games open with a
voice introducing a magical realm and the evil
forces that have befallen it? That's awesome, sure,
but it also smacks of simple-mindedness. Woking
Mars, like some other games, avoids exposition in

encounter

favour of modern storytelling techniques, such as
starting the story in the middle and introducing
characters by way of demonstration, This is akin
to movies that require some mental engagement to
unravel the narrative, creating appeal out of the
task of piecing together subtle cues into cohesive
understanding. These films assume the audience

is intelligent, which makes any lesser treatment
tiresome. The approach feels comfortably adult in
Waking Mars, but it doesn't work as well. Here's
why: imagine you're trying to watch a movie, bul
first you have to figure out where to sit, which
direction to face, and which eye to open to see
the film, to say nothing about interpreting its
content. The physical act of consuming a film is
simple and familiar, which means the medium can
jump right in with themes and characters, establish
the trajectory of the work, and generally be clever

CREATE
INSIGHT

RANDY SMITH

May contain adult content

Too often the first things out
of characters’ mouths are
thinly veiled contrivances
explaining what the game is

and sophisticated. Waking Mars has to use

that same bandwidth to calibrate the player,
explaining what the game is and how to play it.
Do | control an avatar directly? If so, with what
viewpoint? Am | supposed to create this or destroy
that? One type of bandwidth l'm referring to is the
player's attention span. With all the focus on what

Ihe game is, storytelling nuance gets lost.

Another type of bandwidth is dialogue. Too
alten in games, the first things out of characters’
mouths are thinly veiled contrivances explaining
what the game is. For Waking Mars, we wanted
all dialogue to be honest to our characters. This
failed in two ways: it was too ambiguous to
explain anything reliably, and produced too much
text. Dialogue meant to be perlectly natural and

introduce the themes, gameplay and characters
was just too long. We reduced the word count
by shilting the burden of training to an objectives
system, which communicates directly from design
to ployer, and is far cleaner than characters
fumbling across the fourth wall while pretending
they aren't. We also implemented ‘depth on
demand’ training, which assumes players can
figure it oul and becomes more explicit only when
needed, resulting in fewer interruptions and a
cosier fit than ‘one size fits all’ static training.

But there's a bigger question: why have
dialogue at all? The interactive medium doesn't
become more advanced by injecting novels into
games, Of course players don't want to read text;
it so rarely connects meaningfully to their
experience. Waking Mars draws from the library
of interactive-appropriale tools, with environmental

storytelling, branching objectives, and interactive
demonstrations. So a theme of the game is
ecosystems, and you hear characters talk abou!
them, find them during exploration, and tinker with
them to observe their responses. The interweaving
of these perspectives on the same material is
intended to be the full package.

The real excuse, though, is that until we have
truly interactive characters, static dialogue is ош
best tool for conveying the human experience with
anything approaching the depth and insight
provided by even а modestly talented film actor.
The role dialogue plays in our game's package of
themes is to contemplate a personal relationship to
the unearthly and suggest reasons you should
care. Even on alien worlds, the human experience
is crucial — in fact, it's arguably the bottom line of
all entertainment. This seems important enough to
justify static text. Unfortunately, there's no way to
know a payoff is coming, as opposed to more
outpouring from an indulgent writer, I'm torn, but
| generally believe the tone of trust and patience
vs instant gratification is pretty adult.

So examining novel topics with a human
perspective; assuming you're patient, intelligent,
and paying attention; leveraging modern
storytelling techniques — might this approach be
enough to satisfy your inner grownup?

Randy Smith is the co-owner of Tiger Style, whose second
game, Waking Mars, is very nearly ready. No, really

147

CREATE
INSIGHT

Word Plo

¥ laying computer games is so much better
f it you care. Yes, саге. | was going to write,
‘invest a degree of emotional input’, or
some other modern-speakish nonsense, but
there's nothing wrong with the word ‘care’. Unless
you've been brought up in it, whereupon the term
might open a can of wormy memories.

Designers and game writers are delighted
that players care. It's seen as a victory. “We've
successtully got into the brain of the player," they
whoop. Then they hightive awkwardly, in that
wannabe American way, and don't bother to
ask what it is the player is caring about. | think
they'd be surprised if they did.

Here's what's happening: if a player spends
several hours with a game, and uses skill,
concentration and perhaps a bit of luck to make
decent headway, they're going lo care. Not
because the characters are engaging or
fascinating, or the landscapes are gorgeous, or
the story is riveting, bul simply because they've
pul in the work. Anyone who's doing well at a
difficult piece of DIY will feel the same thing. ‘This
is going well,’ they think. '| must concentrate,
because | really don't want to screw it all up
and have to start again.’

People also care because they want to win.
They want to achieve victory and see the game
come to an end. In other words, they've
experienced it from start to finish and have thus
got value for money [in the sense that there aren't
likely to be swathes of gameplay they haven't
battled through]. Also, they've won, and people
like winning — just ask Charlie Sheen.

Players also core more if they feel they're
being rewarded as they play, especially if they
think they're being particularly clever or skilful.
Imagine this in-game scenario: you can snipe
some guards and enter a boss's lair through the
front, which is hard but doable. However, if you
lake your lime and scout around, you'll discover a
secre! way in via an air duct, thus enabling you lo
get in unnoticed and without a shot being fired,
which is so much more salishying. Your smartness
has been anticipated by the game's makers and
rewarded, You like them for recognising how
clever you are and for catering for your genius,
and so care more about their product.

148

JAMES LEACH

The case for caring

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Designers are delighted
players care. It's seen as a
victory. They don't ask what
players are caring about

A lot of players, though by no means all, core
more if they're made to laugh, too. Funny, cute or
charming things have an attractive effect on us,
and we're well disposed towards things that make
us giggle. Hence the adulation of Charlie Brooker.

Right then, here's what people arguably don't
care about when they play games: being cast as
a stubbly, nonecked balding white man with little
to say who's suffering a run of terrible luck in a
tough world. Yes, we might raise a smile if our
dour, sweaty protagonist mumbles a cynical
catchphrase once in a while, but to be honest
| think we're over Ihe exforces, posttraumatic
guys with implausibly apt surnames.

Another thing playersident care about much
is the welfare of NPCs in а дате. If you'te over

seven years old, you'll know that they don't exist,
their suffering or tribulations aren't real and that
they're only designed to give you a reason to do
what you're already doing because you bought
the game and hove every intention of ploughing
through the damn thing to win and/or to get your
money's worth [see earlier]. Also, by ће same
token that makes us like developers that reward
our efforts to find different ways of doing things,
we don't like ones that resort to cheap heartstring-
tugging plot elements involving saving and
protecting things that are too pathetic to look
after themselves. And have heads that are too
large for their bodies and big eyes.

Players will cease to care about anything if
they've been let down or if they feel cheated. No
matter how great your game turns out lo be, if
there are bugs, important plot holes or it tricks
players knowingly early on, they're never going
to fall in love with it. It needs the integrity and
internal consistency of a good movie or TV show,
Players need to be able to trust it. Trust it to work,
to deliver Ihe same quality throughout, and to
reward them fairly. (See earlier, somewhere else.)

A while back, | worked on a project of rare
and stunning beauty and depth. Reading through
the story and dialogue that already existed, | was
taken by the richness, the essential human emotion
it contained. If people were going to care about a
game, truly care about it, they'd care about this
one. It was called Milo And Kate, and it's never
going to see the light of day.

Perhaps care is the wrong word alter all.
Maybe we're supposed to just enjoy games:
enjoy Ihe action and the graphics, gel driven
onward by good plot, and have our imaginations
rewarded with decent characters and wellwriften,
fresh dialogue. Yes, we want to see whol
happens next, to influence events and to do things
that satisty us. We want to use our brains as well
as our trigger fingers. That's what's important — we
spend the money and have a great time, зо №5
worth every penny. IF the gameplay, game length,
graphics, skill and reward levels, plot, characters,
and story aren't great, then we've been done,
And we should all care about that.

James Leach 15 а BAFTA Award-winning freelance writer who

| works on games and for ad agencies, TV, radio and online

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=

CREATE
GION Spi

Region Specific:
flexas, US

A big state with even bigger m for its game industry

For a regional game industry with such a mighty track record, Texas
isn't about to rest on its laurels. Dallas-based developers, for example,
continue to make some of the most impressive shooters on the market.
ld Software is still finding new ways to push the limits of graphics
technology with its stunning id Tech 5 engine, used to great effect in

), and Gearbox, another Dallas local, takes its bullet-spraying

Rage (

mayhem in a more visually stylised direction with projects such
as Borderlands 2(7, (1) A bit farther south, BioWare Austin has
reason to celebrate, since the launch of MMOG Star Wars: The Old
Republic went as smoothly as a studio could hope. Texas's
videogame incentive program continues to entice publishers to increase
their footprint in the area, too; the EA Sports label has announced
plans to establish a development presence in Austin. And while the

demise of Ensemble Studios was tragic, its talent has filtered into

exciting new ventures such as Robot Entertainment, which has just
released its first iOS game, Hero Academy. Meanwhile, the University
of Houston is partnering with Section 8 developer TimeGate
Studios in nearby Sugar Land to create a solid curriculum for future

game degrees. The indie spirit is alive and well, too, with an enthusiastic

collective called Juegos Ra псһе і 7 ) recently К

152

LANDMARKS

in North America. ©
The Texas flag's single
star remains a symbol
of the state's unity
and its independence.
iD A scenic view of
Houston's skyline from
the riverside. Austin
is the capital of Texas
and was settled in the
1830s by pioneers,
who originally named
the outpost Waterloo

CREATE
REGION SPECII

J \ / F n \, / | Е VV

How the Lone Star State
is setting the pace for
the US game industry

behind a podium at EA BioWare's North
Austin offices — flanked by two chuffed EA
executives — and announced that the publisher
would be expanding its operations in Texas. The
plan is expected to create 300 new jobs in the
сіу, spanning across programming, art, and
customer support. EA Sports will also be setting up
a new branch to complement its teams in Orlando
and Burnaby. And with at least 167 game
development outfits already in the state, employing
nearly 5,000 people, Texas is currently surpassed
only by California in terms of industry presence.
Even that seat of influence is shifting in Texas's
favour, as evidenced by EA's efforts in recent years
to reduce stoff levels in its California headavarters
and focus growth on places such os the Lone Star
State, where the cost of doing business is far
lower. In 2007, the company employed about
2,800 people in California, according to EA
president Frank Gibeau, but that number has
dwindled to lewer than 1,700 al present.
“Low-cost development is certainly an issue,"
says EA Sports COO Daryl Holt. "We look for
ways іо supplement our high-cost locations for
things that make sense in terms of where we find
talent. Austin has that ready-made gaming talent."
The incentives don't hurt either. Back in 2007,
Texas was one of the first states in the US to roll
out a videogame incentive, recognising the quality
of the jobs - technical and well-salaried — that fuel
game development. The Texas Moving Image
Industry Incentive Program, operated by the Texas
Film Commission, became an even more attractive
prospect for developers last August, when the
incentive cap for videogames was raised from five
per cent lo 17.5 per cent - now on а par with the
cap enjoyed by the film and television industry.
Other states in the US have rushed out similar
incentive programmes, but Texas maintains а key
advantage. "[With] the states that try to dive
in, the money's going to be attractive,” says
Evan Fitzmaurice, director of the Texas Film
Commission. "But videogame companies and
publishers that are thinking about setting up brick
and-mortar operations that have longer lives
[aren't] going to respond solely to incentive
dollars. They need to know that they're moving to
an area where they can hire people, because this
is sophisticated work. You con relocate some
people, but you can’t basically flip the switch and
overnight create an industry where there's never
been a history or foundation laid."
It's impossible lo overstate the impact Texas
has had on videogames, too. Rewind to 1979

| = Texas governor Rick Perry stood

The easily recognised Texas Longhorn steer has a strong
cultural tie back to the region's early frontier ranching days

and you've got Richard Garriott selling his seminal
Akalabeth RPG in Ziploc bags out of the computer
store where he worked in Clear Lake City, like
some kind of tech-narcotics dealer. He would go
оп to found Origin in Austin, create the Ultima
series and lay the D&D-engraved cornerstones of

Nukem Forever at 3D Realms — and helped
them ship the famously beleaguered project.
Although Houston enjoys less notoriety than
Austin or Dallas, its limited AAA studio presence —
Section 8 maker TimeGate Studios operates out of
nearby suburb Sugar Land — is complemented by
a thriving serious games scene. Petrochemical
companies in the area, such as BP and Exxon,
are exploring the use of virtual environments as
collaborative tools, and Archimoge has received
numerous grants fram the National Institutes Of
Health and the Center For Disease Control And
Prevention to develop games to educate youth
about nutrition and disease prevention. The
presence of the renowned Texas Medical Center
and surrounding universities has also sparked lots
of game development in the educational sector.

Texas prides itself on the quality o!
education being delivered to the next generation
of game developers. The University Of Texas ot
Austin has recently added a game development
specialisation to its nationally ranked computer
science department. The Guildhall at Southern

The FPS has its birthplace and Mecca just 200 miles
north of Austin in Dallas. Here, id Software changed
the gaming world forever with Doom back in 1993

the videogame RPG genre. In stealth action, Deus
Ex would be developed down the road at lon
Storm's Austin offices under the leadership of
Warren Spector. Today Texas is the home of
everything trom BioWare's MMORPG Siar Wars:
The Old Republic to indie projects such as Semi
Secrets Canabalt and Tiger Style's iOS hit Spider:
The legend of Bryce Manor. A collective called
Juegos Rancheros has even popped up to keep
Austin's indie community in closer contact.

The most commercially successful genre on
Ihe planet today, the FPS, has its birthplace and
Mecca just 200 miles north of Austin in Dallas.
Here, id Software changed the gaming world
forever with Doom's release back in 1993, and
QuakeCon continues to offer the largest LAN
party in North America to id-worshiping pilgrims
from around the globe. Dallas's shooter legacy
carries on to this day with developers such as
Gearbox continuing to fly the banner next to their
elder statesmen, Demonstrating the tightknit
solidarity of the Dallas development community,
Gearbox even came alongside Triptych — the
remnant of the developers who worked on Duke

Methodist University developed its curriculum in
2003 hand in hand with the leading lights of the
Texas game industry to create arguably the тоз!
respected graduate game development course in
the nation. University of Houston has woven
outstanding games coursework into its computer
science degree programmes, resulting in the best
record among US universities at Microsoft's
Imagine Cup. "Working with motivated students
with strong computing skills has provided us with
а competitive edge" says game development
instructor Dr Chang Yun.

True to its enduring cowboy iconography,
Texas has on aura of frontier spirit that suits the
wide-open possibility space presented by game
development. “When people think about Texas
as а cowboy culture,” says Aaron Thibault,
Gearbox's VP of product development, "I'd say
what that's really about is that we're not afraid to
lake risks and be innovative and put ourselves out
there.” Wilh such promising emerging talent, and
experienced developers to nurture it to maturity,
the momentum of Texas's game industry seems
about as unstoppable as a Longhorn stampede. №

153

Texas's world-class education system prepares the next wave ої pro developers

Adel Chaveleh, TimeGate
Studios president & CEO
(top); Tim McLaughlin, head
of Texas A&M University's
department of visualisation

hen was the last time you

saw а developer's motion

¥ caplure studio and il was
pointed with the colours and emblem of
а local university? Vell, that's precisely
how Houston's TimeGate Studios,
developer of the scifi shooter Section 8,
has decorated its new facilities, which
were built as а joint project between the
studio and the University Of Houston.

It's a powerful symbol of the close ties
between Texass c ame development
community and educational institutions
TimeGate's senior leadership is
also helping Ihe universihy s compulet
science department develop the
curriculum for an upcoming game
development masters programme, GS
well (15 offering work expenence in the
form of large internship classes at its
Sugar land-based НО. In return, the
developer is able to use the mocap
studio for its own commercial purposes.
"The motion-capture studio servec
as the classroom for this internship
program me, says Adel Chaveleh,
TimeGate's president and CEO. "Over
the course of that semester [starting
August 201 1], they built on entire game
and everaged the motion capture for
their project. But they were in the
environment of a game studio, as
opposed lo a lab on campus, which

| think adds a special edge."

4 |
й f i ИП

Three University of Houston teams have been selected as finalists for Microsoft's US Imagine Cup 2012,
the premier student gaming competition focused on using technolgoy to confront societal problems

Just as the building of a successful
game requires extensive collaboration
Delween a studios various disciplines,

the building ot a successful regional

game industry requires equally close
collaboration between game companies
and the education system that's feeding
talent into the system. As such, the
University Of Texas at Austin recently
rolled out а game degree of ils own.

"| have been working with other people
in the gaming community to establish a
programme at UT for ten years, and
finally it is now becoming a reality,”

says Richard Vogel, BioWare Austin’s

execulive producer and VP of production,

who sits on the programme s advisory

board, The first group of students to have
that game design specialisation Will
graduate in 2013.

Texas A&M University’s department ol
visualisation takes a balanced approach,
cultivating both artistic and technical skills
in tandem. Its graduates go on to work in
game and film studios all over the world
"We're a bit different from other
programmes,” says Viz Lab department
head and associate professor Tim
McLaughlin. "any programmes have
a computer science emphasis where art
and aesthetics is minimised. Others have
an art and design angle where tech and
logic are a minor part, We treat them as

equal parts across the board."

TimeGate s mocap studio (left) was built in partnership with the University Of Houston, and 5pillVille, a student project, won honours at Microsoft's Imagine Cup

Texas's marquee graduate-level game programme is serious business

SMU GUILDHALL

2003
ion Plano, Texas
s Nine fulltime
staff, 14 fulltime faculty
four adiuncts
ff Dr Peter Raad
laxecutive director],
Ron Jenkins (deputy
director, development
and external affairs],
Gary Brubaker [deputy
director of academics]
| www. bit. wo YOX

156

kyrim's lead level designer, Doom
ь 4's lead programmer, Insomniac's
creative director: these developers
share something in common, bar the fact
that they hold key leadership positions in
some of Ihe industry's most respected
studios. All three individuals graduated
from The Guildhall, an intensive tworyear
master's programme that operates out of
the Linda and Mitch Hart eCenter at
Southern Methodist University (SMU) in
the Dallas suburb of Plano.

Roughly 45 students enter the
programme per admission [twice a year]
in groups known as 'cohorls', which
reflect a careful balance of disciplines
across art, level design, progromming
and production. In addition to classroom
instruction delivered by the faculty's
veteran developers, The Guildhall's
project load escalates rapidly, with

increasingly complex games developed
by multi-disciplinary student teams.
Ba ancing personal work and projects
can require students to devote anywhere
between 50-100 hours each week. Only
serious aspiring developers need apply.
I've been a fan and supporter ol
МАИ $ programme since its inception,”
says Steve Mix, GameStops general
manager of digital distribution, and
former id Software senior excutive. "I
think we helped [Dr Raad] do it the right
way when we recommended that it be a

The student art on this page was made by: Alex Nguyen (elderly man), Alfonso Callejas (submarine), Jordan Ewing (swamp creature), Haryati Mohdehsan (girl)

graduate level professional development
programme for artists, designers,
producers and programmers based on
large team production. They've graduated
14 cohorts and I've made it to almost
every graduation. ls amazing the footprint
the programme now has in the industry."

The concept for The Guildhall was
ое 2002, when local industry

born in
heavyweights such as John Romero, Tom
Hall and Randy Pitchford approached
SMU's Dr Peter Raad about launching

a game design programme. Traditional
HR channels weren't supplying them with
people who could show up to work on
day one knowing how to move at the
pace of the game industry. They needed

a programme that would deliver battle-
tested recruits who were vetted and
reliable. So Васа worked hand-in-hand
with them to shape the curriculum.

"It's the only way to do it, if you're
honest with yourself and listen intently to
the industry,” he says. "We did not have
the typical academic self-centeredness
һа! we know everything, the mindset thal
says, We're going to build it and you're
going to love it.’ We thought, ‘If we're
going to build something from scratch,
let's start with the end in mind and build
backwards. I'm going to listen to the
neurosurgeons if l'm putting a
neurosurgery programme together. ”

Dr Peter Road
Founder and
executive director

What inspired The Guildhall's approach
and ME юру

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157

Austin

hen Twisted Pixel - the studio behind
decided to relocate

The Gunstringer

Г from Madison, Indiana, to Austin in
late 2008, every member of its staff came along.
Even some friends who'd been volunteering their
services on a parttime basis for free insisted on
following the studio south. A range of options had
been considered, but the worm weather, low cost

of living, deep talent pool, lack of a state income
tax and budget incentives ultimately tipped the
balance to the city. Twisted Pixel was hard at
work at the time on XBLA hit '"Splosion Man and
desperately needed to grow its staff.

"We used a recruiter to try to bring people
to Indiana," explains studio director Michael
Wilford, "and we got like one person. It's hard to
convince people to move from California when
the main perk of your area is basically а Taco Bell
that's open until 2am. Since moving to Austin,

Michael Wilford (top),
studio director for Twisted
Pixel, which was recently
acquired by Microsoft, and
Richard Vogel, executive
producer at BioWare Austin

we've hired people from California and Seattle
who'd say, "Yeah, | used to live in Austin and have
just been looking for a way to come back ever
since,’ so recruitment has been really easy."

But it's not just indies flocking to the area. All
majot publishers have a presence in the state,
and EA has been aggressively
expanding ils footprint in the city.
"I'm very happy that EA has
decided to invest more in Austin,”
says Richard Vogel, executive
producer ol Star Wars: The Old
Republic and vice president of
production al BioVWare Austin.
"Everyone benefits from this,
not just BioVVare. The more
opportunilies there are in the area, the easier
it is to attract good talent to come to Austin."

Austin has a long legacy of development,
going back to Richard Garriott's Origin (which
made Ultima and Wing Commander], and lon
Storm Austin [Deus Ex, Thiel: Deadly Shadows].
I also has stature in the MMOG space, serving
as the initial western headquarters of Korean
publisher NCsoft and bolstered by companies
such as BioWare Austin and the branch of Rift
developer Trion Worlds responsible for building
and maintaining the company’s server tech.

158

The collision of
various creative
disciplines makes
Austin a conducive
environment for
making games

This reputation for great games is what
inspired French studio Arkane, currently working
on stealth-action game Dishonored, to set up a
branch in the area. And having operations in the
city seems to gralt a studio into that lineage of
greatness; now Arkane CEO Raphae

Colantonio
works alongside Deus Ex designer Harvey Smith,
with both sharing the tile of co-creative director

The city's unofficial ‘keep Austin weird’ motto
points to the value the local
community places on free thinking.
This cultural identity is reflected in
the presence of the annual South
By Southwest festival, which began
as а musical showcase and has
since grown to include everything
from film to interactive arts. The
collision of these various creative
disciplines makes Austin a
sublimely conducive environment for videogames,
which tend to revel in that Venn diagram overlap
of music, film and technology.

What's more, the world's largest genre film
festival, Fantastic Fest, has recently partnered with
local indie games collective Juegos Rancheros
(see pl 64] lo create yearrouna events lo
complement its Fantastic Arcade programme.

On the educational front, the decision by local
institution University Of Texas at Austin to establish
a game development degree simply reinforces
Ihe sense that Austin’s potential influence in Ihe
videogame space has no level cap whatsoever,

Austin has become one of
the premier destinations for
US game development, and
games are a growing part
of its creative culture

CEO and cocreative

director
Co-creative director

Why did you choose Austin as the home
for Arkane’s US branch?

The reason why we
A ч
came to Auslin is hal Ch gin and lon Storm

AUST were here Ата both ol nose
companies made same of the biggest
greatest games. It seemed like a great
бат

п for finding game designers апа

developers in general who share the same

vaiues as we do. I'm talking about games

La Пане Ea. Ша ГИ еще Un
ike LIELS Cx, me Ыт seres, УПО

E CHT TICN NIJET — ory cl hose "е QUITS е]

had interesting simulation aspects lo them
Has joining the ZeniMax family with id
Software and Bethesda Softworks given
rise to any collaboration?

| One of the best things about
it is how much overlap there is Bethesda I5
not a big, publicly toded company. This is
shocki ng о OM de МЕС Del MW
worked for a public ly traded с
They are a small group of guys who care
a lot about depth

| |
COS sive Words, ir m mediale y

h cs eve par

Orn ipa "m [eL y.

ri i gar nes [ ПО ОСЕ T
Wie чаг eS
getting feedback оп our дате Кот the

uk IN. F жү = | вы ж r
guys on the Skyrim team. We respect their

Gomes«and they, re spec! our games
Instead of ihe guy v.ho* [simply m. ed

on business
concerns] you're
dealing with the
guy who loves
games and very
much wants the
game tfo be good.

After contracting
on BioShock 2,
was it quite a change to work on
Dishonored, where you have more
freedom to shape the IP?

| [Th ey те] hwo different experiences
and bath are very interesting. Il was very
and it's also

FH
work on our cwn game. ne
"==

tun to work on BioShock 2
very fun to

was 5 relaxing in terms of not hav ng some
af

ne responsibilities SO | à sian ТИ её!
always

ot course Ws

гове by it, But
excina mo Work i on your own IR

| didn à

Bic Shock contract. but

really get to work on the

Raph and

wistophe | | arrier, audio director] and
some of our level designers did. But l've
gotta say, lve па lot ol new IP in
my career, and it's not always better, It's

y A a | ked О J

EWC ling tO work c

love it. But tor ever y excilement, heres a

Dr obi ETT a new | h | ng С} solve 5 | Ч h I2

What are the biggest design challenges
yov're solving now in Dishonored?

C Some ol it is exposing the choices to
the pere in the purest way. Even though
its not an open word, ifs mission based
nak, one of the moos has ils own sandbox
aspect sapu re given п„вёпигарер al
соз od Goch dover can custonise their

own play style — like il mey worl Io play

i = |
Mite sneaky OY Mare jac k гие
Even the map geometr; olfen you can

Fab тЫ
ки LIVE

qo down (his street СИ bat: street
1 |
the frootons

building CH Ihe | yack ol the hui ding, ГЇ
Не not like

or go in Ihe front of the

SWWIITI TE] cry шо ao ГД 1 tish

we re the most nonlinear experience ever
bul you can stil | have an outcome als
really elen. or really surgical. That throws
a fot of modem players for a loop. 5o you

have to spend a lot c r ime making Ihem

feel comfortable and educatin g hem and
rewarding them when they do the ап!
n ng l'm nol saying hat we have Ihe
perfect balance of it vet, but that's the
m ng hat occupies us mosi
That's what we see right now in our
pk aylests People tend іо go tor the most
direct roule and they don't know the

oct ONS 56 ITUCTI

EA's Frank Gibeau gives Governor
Rick Perry a tour of BioWare (top).
Dishonored (above) features an
assassin in a steampunk city

159

John O'Keefe, Terminal
Reality studio director,

and Nancy Beasley,
NutriGram project manager

REGION

CRE

AIE

Pallas

The birthplace of the FPS continues to breed games with unique perspectives

ecalling the moment in 1992 when John

Romero, John Carmack, Tom Hall and Adrian

b Carmack arrived in Texas for the first time,
David Kushner writes in Masters OF Doom:
"Everything in Dallas wos big. The trucks were
big. The car dealerships were big. Even

the people were big, from the towering cowboys
to the statuesque blondes.”

The id Sottware guys were finishing up
Wolfenstein 3D at that point, working out of a
rented apartment in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite.
And their small business was itself on the verge of
exploding into a phenomenon that makes the
word ‘big’ seem like crass understatement, The
studio's revolutionary work would trigger the birth
of the FPS and lock in the commercial coordinates
of the videogame business for years tó come.

The legacy ol innovation in Dallas's
videogame scene doesn't just cover game design
and engine technology, however. Id's early
publisher Apogee Software - whose founder,
Scott Mi
Dallas area

er, coaxed id into relocating to ће
holds the distinction of pioneering
shareware distribution, an early precursor to Ihe
tee-to-play model and the now-standard practice
of downloadable demos.
Developers who got their start
at 3D Realms (һе moniker Apogee
later adopted) have spowned
such studios as Gearbox Software
and Terminal Rea

ity, the latter of
which is finishing up work on
Kinect Star Wars. Just like its
colleagues down the road at id
Software, Terminal Reality
continues to push new developments in engine
technology with its Infernal Engine.

"Our Infernal Engine technology allows us to
really get in and work physics and destruction into
the p

ayer's integral experience," says Terminal
Reality studio director John O'Keefe, “and have
those elements affect how the game is played
beyond just a visual treat. We've made forays
into this since BloodRayne, and ramped it up
considerably in Ghostbusters. One of the Kinect
Star Wars modes focuses on big physics and
destruction, andawe've since worked up a number

of concepts Ihot push these elements iher

Developers who
got their start at
3D Realms have
spawned key
studios such as

Gearbox Sofware

Microsoft's disbanding of Age Of Empires
developer Ensemble Studios in 2009 was a tragic
blow to the Dallas scene, but the splintering of the
studio's talent has given rise to exciting new
startups, such as Robot Entertainment (Orcs Must
Diel, Hero Academy}. Zynga has acquired two of
Ensemble's other offshoots, snapping up Bonfire
Studios [now Zynga Dallas) and Newtoy [now
Zynga With Friends]. With these smaller startups
focusing on mobile, social and
downloadable games, the Dallas
development community has
become even more diverse.

For example, Controlled Chaas
Media, which formed in 2009

and saw success with Pocket Fish

on iOS, has recently expanded its
reach into serious games with The
Quest To lava Mountain. The
game was commissioned by The Cooper Institute
in partnership with the Texas Department Ot
Agriculture as part of the NutriGram.org
programme, which promotes healthier eating

among children. “We really wanted to avoid the
mistake of publishing an educational game thal
was unable to compete with consumer games that
students play," says Nancy Beasley, NutriGram
project manager at The Cooper Institute

Given the development community's
irrepressible spirit, even amid high-profile studio
closures, ji would seem that Dallas has built its
'epulation on Doom but cer'ainlv по! gloom.

Dallas continues to build on
the legacy established in
the early "90s by developers
such as id founders John
Romero and John Carmack

Aaron Thibault
VP of product

Can you feel Dallas’s 20-year-long
FPS legacy informing development in

н |
lute n “ИА à Goubl, You hod 5o

many companies here — 3D Realms.
is. - к ra اتر ا ات وای‎ a Fu i li -E ГЕЧЕ ГЕ
CHOW М р Karl | Ir vb 15 Inneres

F
because Ensemble was here doing
|.

bul Inere wos a lol ol

[ 1
CRT UT VL TI cahon and ges snarnmg even

between Ihe shooter and st сестүү
developers. The point being е gol
[OD Games and Ritual — all thes
Oty pers who'd | e 5r ang

shooter. If | was m min | ABOU reus

and where developmen teams are Га

p 7 “т Жы |ы rer کر اھ‎ р
Lu: Lr LAO 15. amy Я AW

Did Texas's gun and military culture

inspire early FPS development?
у AX тие Some or me worlds largesi army

"si
Ds ong some of fhe more critica СГП,

I T n
ПУСТ exisls proressiOrnd ly п зехоѕ lO SUDO
ks Ar mM анаа рр ЕЕЕ aa u T a u c =“
hal army ar d muy ТОНУСЕ. oo

F Г |
its natural thal WOU woOluld nnd Companies

|
heri [based n] veapon manultacturing
and training, and extending into the virtual

Do you have any regrets about taking
over the tortured development of Duke
Nukem Forever?

i IT SS کے و چ پر‎ = = А = = = b B phe Ё
wos ап OMGZING experience. Jus #0 51
$ wor buh) rr =. im ж-т 1 А fr -M mn 4
ry, i - ^ kam Farsan | rat exem: коң Р
EAL FwDROCHE ГЕЛЕН Каш мы ы E I اا‎ !

whatever blood we poured into shipping
Мы rs ores = finr rr = В Li tog РГ
eoame anda es mna! Dhose. Bur he Ти

ot the effort we put into it is that we

[ |
applied smarts and know-how and skill
тот a group of our lechnical experts in the
г mr ur "n = | ‘aaa a m ч

1 li , 4 I TT [ ^ at f TT Е | [
— BED Ж жыр M cm omes | d Exc Suits
games, Speaking tor myselt, | feel ver,

good that we took on that challenge and

ү i |
KE ГИРЕ 3 л ай E ж Laudis ur ue З "-| AN VT
that we out that feather in our hat. And

|.
as а resull, we оге able lo move into the

НИИ with tha Inchise TO OO 0 nunc]

alca ingl yn ү hi ant io H i iO knews

viral the tuture holds? | haw lea. Bul hoo worked with
I'd say Ihe risks were well worth the the guys at id and Ensemble. Paul said that
rewards that we'll see his mindset was always shaped by the fact

һа! Da sple hod extended L1 hand " h Im

Did bringing Triptych in-house to finish and brought him up as he was starting out

the game feel like helping a wounded

comrade in battle? mentoring anybody who was making an

Absolutely. Dallas is а very close-knit eames! effort to get in and be mentored
mr г Some ot the owners of “Ме lal ng abou that in the conte
Gearbox had worked at 3D Realms, so of Duke Nukem actually, VVe teel like v
they worked very closely with and believed were able to do the same thing with a
in Triptych and what they would be able te developer that just wanted Io finish their

missions.and see that sion Нисаа
"sh үпү, just And we were able to helo with that

Id Software's Rage (top) pushed
boundaries with its id Tech 5
engine. Gearbox's Borderlands 2
(above) is currently in development

16]

Tony Elam, research director
at Rice University, launched
the Houston Serious Games
Consortium in 2003

Archimage, Inc launched

the Playnormous site in 2008
to deliver Flash games that
teach kids about nutrition

162

REGION

CRE

ATE
cpi

uita nuls

Houston

The largest city in Texas has a keen interest in the potential of serious games

ast yeor, а team ol four students Нот Rice

University in Houston created a game called

Azmo The Dragon, which turns a wireless
spirometer — a tool used to measure lung capacity

into a gameplay peripheral [we're guessing

calling it Spiro The Dragon would've raised
copyright concerns]. For children suffering from
asthma, the ritual of blowing into this diagnostic
tool provides data that can be used to anticipate
the likelihood of an impending attack. Sadly,
blowing into a spirometer is a chore that children

frequently neg ect, In the game, however, blowing

into the spirometet helps Azmo burn medieval

castles with columns of scorching breath, and

Ihe more consistently kids loq their readings, the

faster they progress. Pretty clever, eh?

While Houston lags far behind Austin and
Dallas in the size of its commercial videogame
sector serous games are growing rapidly in the
area due to the high concentration of universities,

the presence of the world-renowned Texas
Medical Center - the biggest of its kind in the

nation — and the bustling local corporate sphere.
And it's not just student projects that are surfacing:
Archimage, Inc develops polished Flasn games,
such as lunch Crunch and Food Fury, for its
Playnormous VVeb site, which is designed ю help
kids learn the importance ot proper nutrition Ihe

interactive nature ol games makes

Ihe medium ideal for he ping kids
roleplay different scenarios, and
millions of dollars are being
funnelled via grants into methods
of curbing unhealthy behaviours in
Ihe younger demographic.

Rice University research
director Топу Elam — an insatiable
board game collector — created
the Houston Serious Games Consortium in
2003 to begin connecting members of the loca
education and business communities who had an
interest in gaming. That network has grown from
a few friends in academia to over 250 people
across education, health care and local industry.

"Houston s petrochemical industry is exploring
the use of virtual environments in à serious сү for
advanced training,” says Elam. "The [Texas]
Medical Center now has an interes! in games to

It's not just
student projects:
millions are being
funnelled into a lot of ta
curbing unhealthy
behaviours in kids

help with rehabilitation, and there have been

multiple gaming projects associated wilh that.
Those things — the petrochemical inaustry and tne
Texas Medical Center — they're not in Austin or
Dallas, so that's two areas for serious games
where we're qoi ng fo have an advantage just

because of the fact that we're physically here."

Section 8 developer 'imeGate Studios has
been operating out of Houston suburb Sugar

Land for over a decode. "We have access to

Ihe greatness of a large city, only without the
headaches, and we can work and
live in our own little bubble while
still having access to everything the
big city provides, including talent,"
says CEO Adel Chaveleh. "There's

ent thot we recruit locally

trom other industries. and now with
а direct relationship with University
Of Houston, where we're able to -
at least partially = shape what that
lalent looks like on [graduation], thats an even
better thing for us longterm."

New blood is coming in, too. Pi Studios,
which has worked on huge franchises such as
Call Of Duty and Rock Band, relocated from
Plano to Houston in early 2005. And according
to Elam, Houston is seeing quite a few two- to
four-person mobile app game studios sprouting
up, which bodes well for the diversity of projects
coming oul of the

ocal devel opment commun і у.

Due to the concentration of
universities in the Houston

Adel Chaveleh
President and CEO

Have you ever considered establishing
operations outside the Houston croni?

The plan was always fo set 1
course the thought crosses с
couple years as we ге planning whol the
пех! big siralegic sleps are for us
Sometimes that involves ће explo

м.
Cu Semnad uoc се! Т + ices rur С

ni on
'eadquarters deeply rooted

LAJ i 3 „гн Г. i
vh E m preity
1
|
where we are lor many reasons

||
FIT Taare
1. и 14 | CIR

are times when we ve pretty strona

considered setting up satellite |
outside of Houston. But each time we went
li ri ICH i the proc E55 cy in a 5e exploration:
we always ended up rus
on our studio

Grown Ms С

С um me = я
Һе fe. 30 Over Ine vears Ine

ontinued to happen, but it’s

What was the rationale behind
consolidating het gemi in Houston?
There are obviously pros and cons to
different lc

satellite team in, say, Austin or los Angeles

Dallas — pick

cations the pros d selling up a

or San Francisco or one ol

Ha Ede & Il A T at el T
he big hubs in North America — would be
^ LI gom gi r а= TT il į i | Ё ^
easy access to lalen Butiyith ipot also

OU iS ac Tee о | ighe
ia

p : e 2974 unfamilion. terntor ‚

years, we've never done business in those

r АИ, ze us anms, D i | zu m
cies, V y= n cle ерү ар Xx unto qme

community пеге — Ме government

ILS eS

Piet ILU р р = р иа | T. Bron x
nma ( iy CIP CODI, |4 cd nad

Was it difficult to transition from realtime
strategy games to shooter development
чна you wana Section 8?

| F
i i [

в . E TEST. NT Ta t pë F. Я i

$ mot he concep! is bom firs! and t iE TI

we validate it with business. A lot ol

jevelopers start by chasing Ihe hottes! new
platarm or business model. Wve jus! gı It sounds like you haven’ t outgrown your

c Gi A
ecd about Ihe Section 8 concept, Al

pendent streak.
With that said, we're not one of these guys

around beating

od no FPS experience. we

Our chesi

FL TIT. тыз m y Laipa РЕ РЕГЕ Li 5. В ames a =. a, bia = m "S = m =. my = pre. mk Вы =
and me genre wos shoring to деч pretty and fouling ourselves as keepers or ine
Р. Р Р, Е НР " L = 1755 kher А E 1" m) . t jd uir ала ree LA =, = Ея lim =, - 7. 8
Cac ГИ кич JA ries IL. Vy E [EUM Ч! | el met ‚ nadie EMT y Mi 7 LJ ж IF us CH j IL. J y 1 I Н ti

осу what we want; let's go do ill and have held ownership of our IPs

X A | | ' 4 а ч [|

JO We OUr а Big Del Dul Tose arme mea throudgmo jl ali nese PITS oul a thin С] ка
^ = E = = С = al - gm = = = = = =

mamen w whei e we STEEN our Company the Aliens project inat we re wo king con [5

but then we look an example w
a ree LE = ama N Fl Г я" ry № в y in | =, = á = b = =m, = =, =. =
og step of, WK, we re going Io аюпа hat is up our alley and we gel

и next product, So Ine most excited about it [nen] we re going

recenl Section 8 that came oul this pas! ol of resources behind that kind of oroiec!
„ы FAM rm n dic LAS m acr LI p^r | ril a n? Emm f F A p karar тг ре р ы” om "N Г ^L E!
yer пот only did we develop n bul we 0. TEAR was onginer grec! example о
sel-published it, we cerled it with a nat, Even though FEAR and A ren |

f FF i
plattarms ourselves, we selHinanced it we aur IP. they play to our studios strengths

TimeGate is currently working
with Gearbox on Aliens: Colonial
Marines (top), having released
instalments of its Section 8 series

П ar EE I Gurren: Si | 5 all a ul кё cp пе legm gets гео excited abi iur if. and

Jr ing ander pushi: ah and they're |
mc =") al o re | 9i OS karmıs Rx а h g L,

163

164

CREATE

REGION SPECIFIC
INDIE PROFILE

Juegos Rancheros

Austin's new indie gaming collective just wants to show you something awesome

Clockwise from right: Fantastic Arcade meets at Alamo Drafthouse's Highball lounge, Semi Secret's upcoming Hundreds, Tiger Style's Waking Mars is due soon

Co-founder, Semi
Secret Software
Brandon Bo
Founder, Venus Patrol,
and IGF chairman

` u& lo a combination ot closures of bia
] à A i i | ү,
ОШО ALIS 4 JUME u imn Feen!

шеш

WSLS Cr d Ih iE flew |, yt weil oe d | а!
channels | АИС е l which Indies can sall һе

work, Ihe city has seen а resurgence in small

developers + elling up she op. Ve speak Io Semi
Secrel Software ( “Erle under Adam Saltsman
and Venus Patrol founder IGF chairman
Brandon Boyer abou! how they're nurturing

а community, along wi fe Ka такова Games
founder Wiley Wiggins, where indies can

| |
meel up, drink a ef beers, and get inspired

First off, the name Juegos Rancheros i is loco.
Brandon Boyer It's а stupid pun, and it's kind
of silly compared toa lot of other names, but
Ihere's something about i (hol makes ita list e
more inviting, because it doesn't sound like а
serious hardcore nerd game thing. It just sounds
Ike ifs а goo funny thir 9 about game culture
аги a we ve seen thal reflected in the audience
that we get in

Adar Se TR " 6 Пе f; rines! ather enc ol Ihr
am ni > lanes стег enc Ie
spectrum пот ‘Local Austin Game Deve орет
ke thal

Whos going jo. show up k some ith ing са lled

Juegos Ran: heros wuh a stack of business

Business Association’, or something

cards, saying, "m going

o collect some social
networking resources today е
BB There's a lot e academic
stuff about games and busines:
stuff about games that a lot а
рес ред don't really care about
and they just want to see
something awesome. Thal's
always been my NESE

in whal Га like to quive inem = on awesome
show about videogames, most of which hey ve
never seen or heard of before, and just cut انات‎
all the rest of the stulf

How connected were the various indies in
Austin prior to Juegos one

AS | was hanging out with some artist friends
who were ol nigger 3 studis and Wwe would
have lunch once in a while, But as those studios
fok ded CI a TEH ا‎ le STUCE o jul Or Ihe TST WE
went from six or seven peop yole who were Irying
to ir дае A un companies іо make
videogames in Austin to ike 20 ЗО or JO in
the space of a year or two, between roughly
2008 ana 2010 ar it it's still kind al

sio nS | Feel lige Ш de! ITA lic ГІ Ci Жап

li па .
"anal

community 15 growing at ће same time,

Why didn’t these developers just get
absorbed back into the existing industry?
BB Austin’s indie second wave look oft in ea

РУ Р ‚|. Г mm eT x
Pid 09 O-ish and | don't think it's coincidental rg

it wos around this time that the App »tore was
becoming a сою alternative; | think those
early people. were people like Tiger 5 е that

hac literally iu iust come out of big studios and

were saying "Oh, we can make this iPhone
thi ng pee bly work.

AS Му whole reason for going independent in
the first piace was Ihat | was гес |

forcing me to do а worse job.

nat was a
common Ihing. You turn sanai 1g in that was
really Good ¢ and mey would demand that WOU
make it worse. A lot of people can only do that
for so lona, but they love what ore do. | think

t you combine the rari nity of d guo
distribution and the obvious sustainability
problem ot big studio development, "t. just get
this s really natural springing up of small shops.
People were buming out, but they didn't have

to leave the industry completely, They were
| || = i жа — m = = — тшш, u тя “= = 7 =| = m gm, PFI =
able to set aside а litle money and take some

HRAS ОП Cheng MEI OWN WOT Winco 15 kind
эл"

ot cool. We talk very little business at Juegos

bul theres a community sense of, OK, this isnt

аў [
hopesess. fou Con survive, you сап ear rood

and you can be creatively fulfilled

Have collaborations between indie devs
rh as a result of he collective?

BB Despite the ‘nobody swaps business cards
thir b kenc 5 has PS re aly.a qa od Fr =r Iis
Right out of the gate, Austin newcomeı Dale
As uslir 1 heiped Shay Pierce out with artwork for
Connectrode, then Bobby Arlauskas ended up
doing пееюпсе sound work tor | ge T ray leon
VVaking Mars, which [9 Jot] it an IGF audio nod
and most recently Ro рїп De sep Sea’ Amott
ended up toy р ng of the sound for Capsule,
Adams soorte-bereleased Venus Рано дате
анун оо, you want to call it, it's hard

ia see any or mal naving happened WTA

the group getting together this regularly

All signs point to Texas.

Texas has a long history in the game industry, with more than 160 companies calling the
Lone Star State home. As a national leader, we have a solid foundation for gaming with
our Texas-sized talent pool, a superior, low-cost infrastructure and an unmatched quality
of life. In addition, the production incentives available and sales tax exemptions for items
and services used to produce games make Texas your go-to destination.

OFFICE OF GOVERNOR RICK PERAY
TEXAS WIDEOPENFORBUSINESS.COM WWW.TEXASFILMCOMMISSION.COM

WE АВЕ HIRIN

SCE Worldwide Studios Europe are now recruiting for
their upcoming projects. Positions are available for:

Artists - Designers - Programmers - Producers

PlayStation is at the forefront of gaming and SCE Worldwide Studios
Europe is at the forefront of developing for all PlayStation platforms. From
Eyetoy to Singstar, Motorstorm to Killzone we consistently strive to produce
innovative, high quality titles which not only showcase PlayStation but also
challenge the gaming world. So whether you want to Бе blasting Helgast
а the cutting edge of FPSs or pushing the boundaries of social gaming
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package including pension, private health, private dental,company bonus
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To find out more, visit any of the websites below or follow us on
Twitter @PlayStationjobs

Be a part of PlayStation!

evolution

www.playstationjobs.co.uk

IERRILLA LY http://www.guerrilla-games.com/jobs

| Follow us on Twitter
[ү] mee http://Awww.mediamolecule.com/jobs (M PlayStationjobs

SONY

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We are constantly searching for the very best senior level candidates to bolster
our talented team and make thrilling games.

Do you have considerable experience and creative ideas ?

Looking for a challenging and inspiring job ?

Apply Now.

jobs@asobostudio.com

GDC SAN FRANCISCO 2012 | BOOTH CP 2001

www.bigpoint.net/jobs

сату Al PROGRAMMER
Unreal GRAPHICS PROGRAMMER
Binding ENIOR LIGHTING ARTIST
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Talented Level / Game Designers - Animators - Producers, please apply to
jobs@tequilaworks.com or-visit tequilaworks.com

MicrosoftStudios _

XBOXLIVE. ^ Trauma, WORKS
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to make the best games.

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professional business Competitive salaries and security package 30 days annual
holidays Breakfast and lunch every day from the IOI canteen Weekly sweet treat
surprises from the IOI canteen А steady supply of drinks, snacks and fruits

©2012 IO INTERACTIVE A/S. HITMAN ABSOLUTION and the HITMAN logo, IO INTERACTIVE and the 10 logo are trademarks of IO Interactive
A/S SQUARE ENIX and the SQUARE ENIX logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Square Enix Holdings Co., Lid. All rights reserved

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#239
March 14

178

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